Luke Abbott has today announced his first solo record in six years Translate will be released on 20 November via Border Community. Along with the announcement he has shared 'Kagen Sound', the album's richly-textured opener - menacingly driving but punctuated with endearing flourishes, it's an assured and impossible to ignore return.

Speaking of the track Abbott says: "Kagen Sound is one of the simpler tracks on the record, it's based around the Korg Monopoly, which is one of my favourite sounding synths. The track is named after an American puzzle box maker, he makes the most incredibly intricate wooden puzzle boxes. I've been interested in puzzle boxes since I saw Hellraiser when I was about 11 years old, maybe I shouldn't have seen that film so young. To me the track feels like a a huge opening in the earth, like a cosmic doorway, which is why it's the opening track on the album."

In the time since his last solo record, Luke Abbott has had to re-forge his
relationship with making music alone. His solo work has always been deeply
entwined with his sense of self and during a tumultuous time in his personal life that needed to be re-evaluated, and so did the music along with it. The result is Translate, a record that sees Abbott with a renewed sense of purpose. Written, recorded and produced by Abbott - Translate is a strikingly direct body of work that retains a great depth and fullness. At times dark and ominous, others bright and welcoming, this is Abbott’s sound fully realised and never so sure of itself.

Abbott’s solo artist recording career may have recently taken something of a back seat, but his explorative six year sabbatical has clearly been put to good use, with plenty of mix and remix work, a new more dancefloor-directed alias Earlham Mystics and a productive new sideline in film, with two solo soundtracks to his name to date: fellow Norfolk native Guy Myhill’s The Goob (winner of Best Music at the 2014 Stockholm Film Festival and eventually released as 2015’s Music For A Flat Landscape album) and Jessica Hynes’ The Fight (released under the title Music From The Edge of an Island in 2019). But most pivotal of all was the 2016 formation of the experimental jazz trio Szun Waves together with Jack Wylie of Portico Quartet (saxophone) and Laurence Pike of PVT (drums), with two Abbott produced
and mixed fully-improvised albums to show for it so far (and number
three in the pipeline), and jazz and electronic critics united in their acclaim. (“The result is that rarest of things: an improvised album that sounds so perfect, you’d think it was all planned,” said The Line Of Best Fit of 2018’s New Hymn to Freedom.)

Translate

01) Kagen Sound - Luke Abbott

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