Author Neil Gaiman has teamed up with Australia's FourPlay String Quartet — the group who worked on the soundtrack to his novella The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains — to produce his first full-length album Signs of Life, out April 28 on Instrumental Recordings.
The string quartet provides vocals and instrumentals on the record, with additional words, music and backing vocals from Gaiman. Today, he shares the spoken word cut "Credo" and "Bloody Sunrise," the latter arriving alongside its own James Chappell-directed music video.
Gaiman said of the project in a statement:
I'm not entirely certain when I fell in love with a string quartet. I remember our first date, though. It was a day spent in a tiny room somewhere in the backstage maze of Sydney Opera House. We played the next night on the stage of the Sydney Opera House. It was remarkable. It was so much fun we did it again. We did a tour together, but when we reached Carnegie Hall, we decided we needed something better than me reading a poem as our encore, so we stole some time from soundcheck and rehearsed a song. And then we performed our song on the stage of the Carnegie Hall, and that felt a lot like something special. We started to build a repertoire, and when I was in Australia we would make music together. These are some of the things we've made together. It's been a long fallow winter, the last two and a half years. Here are signs of life.
Watch the video for "Bloody Sunrise" below, where you can also hear "Credo" and see the album's tracklisting.
Signs of Life:
1. Clock
2. Möbius Strip
3. Bloody Sunrise
4. The Wreckers
5. Song of the Song
6. Credo
7. Neverwhere
8. Poem first read on January 26th 2011 at the Sydney Opera House
9. The Problem with Saints
10. In Transit
11. Signs of a Life
12. Oceanic
The string quartet provides vocals and instrumentals on the record, with additional words, music and backing vocals from Gaiman. Today, he shares the spoken word cut "Credo" and "Bloody Sunrise," the latter arriving alongside its own James Chappell-directed music video.
Gaiman said of the project in a statement:
I'm not entirely certain when I fell in love with a string quartet. I remember our first date, though. It was a day spent in a tiny room somewhere in the backstage maze of Sydney Opera House. We played the next night on the stage of the Sydney Opera House. It was remarkable. It was so much fun we did it again. We did a tour together, but when we reached Carnegie Hall, we decided we needed something better than me reading a poem as our encore, so we stole some time from soundcheck and rehearsed a song. And then we performed our song on the stage of the Carnegie Hall, and that felt a lot like something special. We started to build a repertoire, and when I was in Australia we would make music together. These are some of the things we've made together. It's been a long fallow winter, the last two and a half years. Here are signs of life.
Watch the video for "Bloody Sunrise" below, where you can also hear "Credo" and see the album's tracklisting.
Signs of Life:
1. Clock
2. Möbius Strip
3. Bloody Sunrise
4. The Wreckers
5. Song of the Song
6. Credo
7. Neverwhere
8. Poem first read on January 26th 2011 at the Sydney Opera House
9. The Problem with Saints
10. In Transit
11. Signs of a Life
12. Oceanic