Astralingua Reveal New Single SPACE BLUES, New Album SAFE PASSAGE Out 3/8 via Midnight Lamp Records

Denver-based band Astralingua have revealed their new single "Space Blues" from their forthcoming album Safe Passage out March 8 via Midnight Lamp Records (pre-order). "Space Blues" premiered at PopMatters and can also be shared via Bandcamp.

Last month the band released the single "A Poison Tree." The track premiered at Atwood Magazine and can also be shared at Bandcamp, Spotify or Soundcloud.

The song is based on a William Blake poem and the band's composer Joseph Andrew Thompson says:

There's a certain playfulness in a lot of Blake's works, and in particular in "A Poison Tree." In the few adaptations of the poem I've heard, I don't feel like that's been expressed, and I wanted to create a version the way I hear it said or sung. There's so much movement, energy, passion in his work. He's a singularity in the art and poetry world, and his vibrant uniqueness is what draws so many other artists to him.

Blake was largely ignored in his time, yet he continued on his own path creating works so unlike what was in fashion. His unique artistic vision, unaffected by marketable fads - its purity and passion - is that with which so many artists since him have connected. Despite their spiritual and universal themes, one takes his works very personally.

"A Poison Tree" always stood out to me with its playful observations on anger, revenge, deceit, and finally, joy in victory. To me, the mood is a lot like Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," but with much richer meaning.

Composer Joseph Andrew Thompson and backup vocalist Anne Rose Thompson create evocative and eerily harmonized music as Astralingua. The nomadic space-folk duo explores life's unknowns, blending haunting vocal harmonies, radiant strings, and otherworldly soundscapes into crafted songs that fall somewhere between classical, folk and psychedelia.

We all live with the knowledge that life is fleeting, and that even our most cherished memories will one day turn to dust. With a mixture of awe, fear, and hope, we often find solace in dream worlds, alternate realities, and notions of the afterlife. Whether the transition between these worlds is peaceful or not -- if we indeed arrive unscathed and unharmed -- is the central question that Denver space-folk duo Astralingua ask with their new album, Safe Passage, due in March 2019.

"The journey to the afterlife does not begin at death, but rather at birth," says Joseph Andrew Thompson, Astralingua's songwriter and composer. "Death is merely a staging ground where we change our clothes and command a new vehicle onwards."

This is the conscious starting point from where Joseph and backup vocalist Anne Rose Thompson set out on Safe Passage. In probing the myriad planes of existence, they blend haunting vocal harmonies, radiant string ensembles, and otherworldly soundscapes into a sound that falls somewhere between classical, folk and psychedelia. Each song on the record takes on the enduring quest for peaceful transit from a different perspective, and together, they present a full survey of crossing over and moving between worlds, a stirring, inquisitive look at what it means to be alive -- and to die.

Such themes resonate strongly with the couple, whose own lives have forced them to confront the transitory nature of being. They first met briefly in a San Francisco hostel and later, reunited in Europe, spending a summer engrossed in the continent's history and art. Upon returning, their connection deepened as they supported each other through tragedy - Anne lost her father in 9/11, and a few years later, after they had married, Joseph endured serious health difficulties that kept him from his music for an extended time.

Ever there for one another, the two have persevered, all the while continuing a life of nomadism that they adopted in their early days together. Like wandering minstrels of old, they set up in corners of the world for months at a time, writing and recording as they go; Safe Passage came together on a mobile studio during stays in the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevadas, Besançon, France, and Denver.

Steeped in Romantic inquisition, and birthed from two individuals familiar with the highs and lows of this ephemeral existence, Safe Passage is a personal and haunting exploration of the great challenges that exist as we move through this changing world and search for home.

As they proclaim in the album's final song, "The Troubled Road," "Oh what a struggle it has been/ But even the longest night must end."

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