The Orielles Share New Track 'BEAM/S'

The Orielles have announced details of their new album Tableau, which will be released on October 7th, 2022 via Heavenly Recordings. The album proves a genuinely contemporary record which voyages far beyond the musical limits reached on their previous albums Silver Dollar Moment (2018), Disco Volador (2020) and La Vita Olistica (2021).

Self-produced in collaboration with Joel Anthony Patchett (King Krule, Tim Burgess), the album will be available as double-album vinyl edition, CD and DL.

Additionally, the band have shared first offering "BEAM/S", a gorgeous 7-minute-53-second piece of constantly shapeshifting celestial dream pop that heralds the truly extraordinary Tableau. The track is accompanied by a visually impressive video.

Talking about the track, Esme from the band said: "This is a song that has travelled, grown and adapted with us through all of the seasons. This is why the lyrics kind of reflect that, the song reflects the changing of conditions. The warping of time, memories and relationships that you foster along the way. The original track was jammed at practice, Henry would bring his recording gear and it came about in quite an off the cuff way. I can't remember how we really began jamming that.

We further developed it whilst jamming at Eve Studios. We added distortion pedals and made it really big, but then going into the studio months later, maybe a year or more, we pared it back slightly. The majority of the song is just us in a room, a big room at that, which did the track a lot of justice. We wrote a visual score inspired by Wadada Leo Smith for this one, and then in the later half you hear the group percussion which is the final fallout of the song, and has nods to Afrobeat, where the majority of the song is taking this slowcore, emo feel to it. The track was originally titled Brian Emo."

The band will shortly be sharing details of a full UK headline tour, in the meantime, they recently announced two very special shows in association with Piccadilly Records in Manchester and Rough Trade in London where they will be performing with full orchestral backing. The dates of the shows are as follows:

10/7/2022 - Stoller Hall, MANCHESTER with orchestra (Piccadilly Records show)

10/8/2022 - EartH, LONDON with orchestra (Rough Trade show)

Since forming in the West Yorkshire town of Halifax, over a decade ago while still in their early teens, the Orielles have journeyed from lo-fi DIY indie origins to Stereolab and A Certain Ratio inspired avant-pop even directing and scoring their own experimental film and now, with their new album they've created a genuinely modern record - an experimental double album which utilizes holistic jazz practices, oblique 21st century electronica, experimental 1960s tape loop methods, otherworldly AutoTuned vocal sounds, the downer dub of Burial, Sonic Youth's focus on improvisation and feedback, and Brian Eno's legendary Oblique Strategy cards.

At the end of 2020, the Orielles - vocalist and bassist Esmé Hand-Halford, drummer Sidonie Hand-Halford and guitarist Henry Carlyle-Wade - regrouped to rehearse in Manchester, the city that the band have made their home across the last five years. When all of the band's live dates to promote their second album were scrapped due to the pandemic, the group instead spent 2020 creating La Vita Olistica, a high-concept art film directed and written by the Hand-Halford sisters which they toured in cinemas across the following year, something which was the beginning of a series of creative breakthroughs that would result in Tableau.

One such breakthrough came when the Orielles were booked to host a monthly show on Soho Radio. Broadcasts quickly became impromptu research and development sessions for the ideas that would feed into the album.

"Doing that monthly meant we had a reason to meet up and bring two hours of music between us which we'd play, discuss, hold physically and share" says Henry. "We were listening to much more contemporary music than before" adds Esmé.

A further breakthrough came while remixing another band's track in a studio in Goyt, on the edge of Stockport. This became the Goyt method, a central idea behind Tableau. "To Goyt it" explains Sidonie, "that's getting all these pieces and rearranging them. We had vocal melodies and ideas that we'd then run through and sample, and play them on sample pads. We were being editors, really."

Where the band had previously only gone into the studio once songs had been tightly crafted at the demo stage, the Orielles began to consider new practices in line with the modern sound they were aspiring to. No demo's. Heavy improvisation. And no producer - only the band collaborating with friend and producer Joel Anthony Patchett.

The album would be mostly recorded across Summer 2021 holed away in the Sussex coastal town of Eastbourne. Its recording is a story of experimentation, improvisation and a band discovering how to create an entirely new sonic palette.

As well as the adoption of contemporary 21st century production, the Orielles used concepts from the world of art and minimalism in creating Tableau. Sidonie had researched the graphic scoring method of Pulitzer Prize nominated trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith. They also utilized Oblique Strategies - the playing cards designed to aide creativity created by Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt in the early 1970s. "We'd been speaking about wanting to use them for ages, and then we found a set of cards at the studio in Eastbourne" explains Sidonie, "before each song, we'd pick out a card and that would be our motif for playing that take."

The result is a double album that rewards serious immersion, as complex as it is diverse. Though Tableau is likely to challenge preconceptions, this is something the band suggest they have been doing for quite some time anyway. "All through our whole career we've had to prove ourselves so, so much" explains Henry. "You can't disconnect the age and the gender thing either" adds Esmé, "People belittle your age because they see women in the band. Whereas lad bands, if they're eighteen it's apparently exactly what people want to see." Being from a small town in West Yorkshire may have added to that also, but Sidonie counters that "being from Halifax has also been a blessing, it's kept our egos in check."

Perhaps more than any of this, though, Tableau is also simply the product of the unique telepathy between three singular musicians that have grown in symbiosis for over a decade now - simply the three of them in a room.

"As creators, for the fact we've produced it ourselves, it feels like a starting point" suggests Esmé, "even though everything that's going previously has counted, this now feels like Ground Zero." For the future, now, it's all gates open.

Watch the new music video here:

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