Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine have announced their new collaborative album A Beginner’s Mind – you can hear two songs from the project below.
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The 14-track LP, which is set for release on September 24 via Asthmatic Kitty Records, was written when the two labelmates decamped to a friend’s house in upstate New York for a month-long songwriting session.
“Watching a movie to unwind after each day’s work, they soon found their songs reflecting the films and began investigating this connection in earnest,” a press release explains about the album, which is said to be “(loosely) based on (mostly) popular films – highbrow, lowbrow and everything in between”.
“The results are less a ‘cinematic exegesis’ and more a ‘rambling philosophical inquiry’ that allows the songs to free-associate at will,” the release adds. “Plot-points, scene summaries and leading characters are often displaced by esoteric interpolations that ask the bigger question: what does it mean to be human in a broken world?”
A Beginner’s Mind was previewed yessterday (July 7) with the songs “Reach Out” and “Olympus”, which you can hear below.
The video for “Reach Out” was shot earlier this year by Stevens and De Augustine on VHS-C cameras from their respective coasts, New York and California. The clip stars their beloved dogs Joku (a Jindo) and Charlie (a Havanese), and was edited by Jess Calleiro.
You can see the tracklist for Stevens and De Augustine’s collaborative album A Beginner’s Mind below, and pre-order the record here.
1. Reach Out
2. Lady Macbeth In Chains
3. Back To Oz
4. The Pillar Of Souls
5. You Give Death A Bad Name
6. Beginner’s Mind
7. Olympus
8. Murder And Crime
9. (This Is) The Thing
10. It’s Your Own Body And Mind
11. Lost In The World
12. Fictional California
13. Cimmerian Shade
14. Lacrimae