Name: After Masterpieces
Brand: Rupert Clervaux

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

WHYT 022

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Colour

Colour details

Discogs ID

Discs

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music US

Limited edition

Release date

2019-06-04

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier US

Rush Hour Music B.V.

Tax rate US

Sales:8.875

UPC / Barcode

1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Rupert Clervaux

Genre US

Electronic

Label US

Whities

Experimental musician Rupert Clervaux releases his debut solo album ‘After Masterpieces’ on Whities. The record features guest performances from saxophonist and trumpet player Eben Bull, singer Sian Ahern, and renowned experimental artist Anna Homler (aka Breadwoman) whose inimitable voice ushers us into the record’s opening prelude, and out of its redemptive final piece. ‘After Masterpieces’ sets six recitals of Rupert’s poetry in unique, unpredictable and expansive musical scenery. The enigmatic and densely compacted texts, reworked and gently honed throughout the album’s slow creation, find an aerial perspective from which a lifetime of reading, listening and thinking is carefully re-mapped. The broad thematic scope takes in aesthetics, ancient mythologies, the origins of language and music, epistemology and ecology––to name just a few––all of which remain tightly intertwined, resistant to abstraction, and imbued with a sense of inquisitive ambiguity which treats all certainty with suspicion: the listener is invited to find their own threads, draw their own conclusions and think their own thoughts––as Anna Homler once aptly said of her own work, “…it’s not didactic, it’s poetic.” Initially deriving its impetus from the mood and rhythm of the words, the album’s music utilises a wide-array of performance and production techniques. Clervaux draws on his full range of musical interests, creating long-form pieces that at turns support the recitals and then lead the way for the instrumental swathes within and between them. The sounds of ‘After Masterpieces’ revolve through the melodic ambience of ‘Her Fingers of Pink Light’; the dark electronics and multi-layered samples of ‘In Shadowlands of Like and Likeness’; the tentative interplay of piano and voice on ‘Damper and Drum’; and the riff-like patterned percussion and free improvisation of ‘Make Nature Speak.’ As the LP draws to a close, Homler and Bull join Rupert on ‘L’amore che Muove il Sole’—a sprawling anti-hymn, echoing the structure of ‘The Divine Comedy’, which discovers, in place of Dante’s heavenly paradise, a fragile optimism for positive change in the wreckage of failed grand narratives.

After Masterpieces

Music US