Luke De-Sciscio Announces New Album EUCHARIST

English folk artist Luke De-Sciscio has announced that he will release his next album, Eucharist, the second in a planned trilogy of records, next Friday, April 24. Today, he shared the album's first single, "Jamie Song" - listen below!

Pre-order Eucharist via Bandcamp, Spotify or Apple Music.

Eucharist continues the narrative that began with Good Bye Folk Boy, the album Luke released last month. His single "I'm A Dream Fighting Out Of A Man" garnered praise from NPR's All Songs Considered, with Luke making this year's NPR Austin 100, stating, "Good Bye Folk Boy winnows De-Sciscio's sound down to skeletal sketches made of little more than an expressive voice, intricately plucked acoustic-guitar strings, and songs that'll get stuck in your head for days." Luke performed five transcendent shows at The New Colossus Festival in New York before the lockdown began.

Discussing Eucharist, Luke states, "Anything that I can do to extend a reaching hand or offer even the faintest semblance of hope right now seems like the only path to take. It is an introspective, solitary scrabble for meaning in the face of wordless weight. It is riddled with hope because it dares ask again, and again, and again, in innumerable ways-if THIS is not the way, then what IS? I felt this one as a weight in my belly. To birth it now seems only too appropriate, as we have the time to consider it. It was born of consideration, introspection and solitude."

Luke wrote Eucharist entirely in a church garden just down the hill a little way from where the album cover photo was taken last spring. The garden was tiny, secluded, beautiful, and remote. Luke went there every day after the tumultuous period during which he wrote Good Bye Folk Boy. He was trying to slow things down, and sink in, instead of always trying to find gratification with external stimulus. Luke describes a weight in his stomach, that for all the silence and stillness, and bees and birds, and breathing... wouldn't dissipate. He felt as close to heaven as he could imagine, and yet he was riddled with unease.

"Some of Eucharist is about trying to define that unease and some of it is about finding contentment precisely where you are, in the moment you are in the present," Luke continues. "But a huge amount of the record, I'd say the main concept, is trying to find words for my 'self', when the entire idea I had for 'my' 'self' had dissolved. Folk Boy, and who I was then, was a collection of behaviors and patterns and routines and actions that... when the whole charade sort of snapped, came bubbling up to face me. And in facing me, I recognized that all of that pain I was then feeling was precisely the pain I had dealt out."

Folk Boy finishes with "New Skin," a song about the idea that a new self was emerging. This album, Eucharist, is a 'scrabble for meaning' ["Prison of Words"], when that self has dissolved. Though this all sounds dark and heavy, Eucharist is underpinned by a search for bliss. A search for euphoria.

If Folk Boy was the destruction of self-words pouring out-Eucharist is the incubation of self in wordlessness. The final chapter in the trilogy, Sublime, is the new self, emerging with the words to make sense of it all. And thus, they form a coherent journey.

Luke concludes, "The fact that that trilogy converges now, in the year 2020, as if serendipity had ordained that I were to see clearly this year, well that is just poetry beyond belief. And I have the words to share, and Sublime shares them. But for that chapter, you will have to wait."

Photo Credit: Gerry Hughes

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