Stream / Buy LAKE GEORGE HERE

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‘Terracotta‘, the sprawling, chopped, urgent first single from ‘New Bodies’ earned fans both locally and internationally, making #10 on the AMRAP Metro Charts with support from FBi Radio, Triple R, RTRFM, 2SER, 4ZZZ and more; another coveted spin on BBC6 and an inclusion in Apple Music Jazz’s New Latitudes playlist and top spot on Four Tet’s own personal public Spotify playlist.

The second official taste of ‘New Bodies’ arrived via ‘Lake George’, a “breathtaking” meditation on a powerful local place that provided a backdrop to Tangents inception some nine years ago. Aired on Tom Ravenscroft’s BBC6 program ahead of its release, the track has drawn praise from community radio, international media and beyond.

True to their experimentalist bent, Tangents relinquished album cut ‘Immersion’ to acclaimed LA-based sound designer Katie Gately (Björk, Nosaj Thing), whose “massive, near death” rework earned nods from The Quietus, RTRFM, FBi Radio and more. Just ten days ahead of the release of ‘New Bodies’, it was pioneering artist and producer Jim O’Rourke’s (Stereolab, Sonic Youth, Joanna Newsom) turn to remix ‘Terracotta’ into something “majestic and winding” (Stereogum).

In the year between ‘Stateless’, Tangents’ debut for the revered US label Temporary Residence Ltd. (which scored a 7.8 on Pitchfork & support from FACT Magazine, HYPEBEAST, The FADER and more), and the recording session that laid the foundation for what would become the new album ‘New Bodies’, the band – longtime friends and fans of each other’s work – performed together intensively, becoming an intuitive unit of musical creativity. But this live incarnation, while embedded itself in electronics, still needed to be warped & glitched further into Tangents’ cyborg aesthetic.

‘New Bodies’ sees Tangents marrying their cut-up electronic tendencies comprehensively with the organic-electric, freeform improvisatory space-rock of their live performances. Where ‘Stateless’ was born from a series of individual recording sessions and an intensive post-production process, most of ‘New Bodies’ was sourced from a single day recording at Sydney’s Free Energy Device Studios with engineer Richard Belkner, with all four instrumentalists in separate spaces playing live together – spontaneously composing. From there, likely passages were chosen through group and individual listening, and various members began the work of shaping these recordings.

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Stream / Buy TERRACOTTA HERE

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Album track ‘Oort Cloud’, recorded a year prior to the FEDS session during the filming of the ‘Jindabyne’ and ‘N-Mission’ live videos can be seen as the seed from which ‘New Bodies’ grew from; the point where Tangents decided to recalibrate their fluid group improvisations to interlock with ‘Stateless’s hyper-rhythmic and electronic impulses in a studio setting.

So, perhaps surprisingly, the full structure of some of the songs existed in the original improvisations – but at other times, the recording exits the studio and lads at the fingertips of Ollie Bown, to fly off on a fanciful electronic tangent. Instruments may be left alone (clean electric guitars; a prepared piano), or radically transformed (a cello dropped an octave; drums doubled; instrumental lines turned to MIDI and re-voiced). And part of the pleasure is in this juxtaposition: a joyful chaos of augmented jazz-funk dissolves into an almost – but not quite – ersatz jazz piano trio outro; an acoustic fusion groove coalesces out of electronically-processed psychedelia.

Through the idiosyncrasies of it all, melody is an important part of Tangents, provided by all members – including some buried vocal emanations from drummer Evan Dorrian. Peter Hollo’s bowed cello spars live with plucked bass notes, or floats distorted over grooves; Shoeb Ahmad’s guitar takes the latter role or with it she finds simple lullaby-like motifs; jazz-inflected, romanticism-influenced piano is contributed by Adrian Lim-Klumpes, also adding searing Fender Rhodes refrains or vibraphone riffs.

While the title ‘New Bodies’ should not be leaned on too heavily for meaning, it comfortably encapsulates Tangents’ sui generis approach to technological integration and their disregard for monolithic genre expectations.

‘New Bodies’ is Tangents’ statement of intent: to explore the cosmos of musical possibility. Tangents will unfurl that intent before the world on Friday 15 June ahead of a national tour – all dates below.

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FOLLOW TOUR

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TANGENTS
‘NEW BODIES’ LP
OUT JUNE 15
VIA TEMPORARY RESIDENCE LTD.
PRE-ORDER ALBUM

1. Lake George
2. Terracotta
3. Arteries
4. Immersion
5. Gone To Ground
6. Swells Under Tito
7. Oort Cloud

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AMNPLIFY – DB