Big Thief Drummer James Krivchenia Details New Solo Album 'Blood Karaoke'

Hear lead single "Emissaries of Creation" ahead of the album's April release

BY Allie GregoryPublished Mar 3, 2022

Much like Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek, fellow Big Thief member James Krivchenia has broken off from the band momentarily to deliver news of an upcoming solo project. The drummer has just announced his third outing under his own name, an experimental-ambient album titled Blood Karaoke.

The record will arrive through Reading Group on April 15, but before then, the artist has shared a new single titled "Emissaries of Creation."

For Big Thief fans, the genre-bending techno-adjacent track might feel unexpected, but Krivchenia's efforts in avant-garde sampling and collage-like production — using audio from unwatched YouTube videos, Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentations and video game walkthroughs sourced by random online generators — should impress nonetheless.

"It was a very iterative, long process, lots of editing and putting together little moments or 10-second chunks with lots of samples," the artist said of the album. "The music was conceived to be a somewhat unbroken 40-minute long composition and I think of the singles as excerpts."

Beyond his latest solo endeavour, Krivchenia has kept busy in the two years since delivering sophomore effort A New Found Relaxation, producing Big Thief's 2022 double-album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You following his contributions to 2019 releases Two Hands and U.F.O.F., as well as a pair of EPs in 2020 and 2021. 

Hear the album's lead single below, where you'll also find the album's tracklisting.


Blood Karaoke:

1. Emissaries of Creation
2. Null States
3. Culture Complex
4. Calendrical Rot
5. Artifact of Error
6. Inherited Forms
7. The Trackless Way
8. Scaleable Future Self Continuity Interventions
9. Sub-Creational Reality
10. The Science of Imaginary Solutions
11. God In Every Way
12. Styles of Imprisonment
13. Exaptation
14. Wall Facer

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