Family Tree

Unravel

Broadcast - Tears In The Typing Pool Demo [ 2004 ]

This Mortal Coil - Kangaroo

Singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan today announces Lookaftering - Expanded Edition, a reissue of her legendary second album, out on 7 February 2025 via Fat Cat Records. 

Marking the occasion of 20 years since the original release, and coinciding with Vashti’s 80th birthday, the new expanded edition features the original studio album along with a second LP / disc of demos, an alternate take, and a live performance version. This edition also comes with reflective sleeve notes from Vashti, producer Max Richter and Devendra Banhart, as well as a 16-page lyric booklet featuring a collection of paintings by Vashti's daughter Whyn Lewis  – paintings that they both say have closely, and coincidentally, reflected the lyrics of the album. 

Originally recorded between 2001 and 2005, the unreleased demos were created at Vashti’s home on her accompanying electric and acoustic guitar along with a host of experimental instrumentation from synths, accordion, piano, strings, pipe organ, harmonium and recorders. The collection of demos offers a more stripped back sound compared to the finished album, and the live version of Lately recorded at an early “comeback” gig in LA in 2006, orchestrated as on the record, is absolutely pitch perfect.
 
Listening to the demos and the final versions side-by-side while reading the sleeve notes is a wonderful experience, learning and hearing how the songs and the long-player evolved, with Vashti and Max Richter (who produced and played on the album), explaining how all of the artists involved (Devendra Banhart, Johanna Newson, Adem Ilhan, Robert Kirby and members of the band Vetiver), touched by Vashti’s original 1970 album, Just Another Diamond Day, jumped at the opportunity to be there. Max Richter recalls, “It felt like a community project; a family of people coming together”.

Devendra Banhart said: “Lookaftering is a quiet prayer for a world left behind, a remembrance of a world that could have been but never was, a Lookforwarding to a world that may yet still be... As ethereal and haunted as these eleven songs may be, they are also rooted in the earthly magic of wisdom born from experience. Something so rare and honest it’s nearly otherworldly in its total human-ness.”

Speaking of the reissue, Vashti said: “the beautiful photograph of Max in the studio playing wine glasses with his young daughter’s violin bow, brings it all back to me - how very fortunate I have been.” 

Vashti Bunyan-If I Were (Demo, 2001)

Dublin Darlin

Prism Overture II

Daydream Vol 2

Kokino

Three Demos

The World Spins (Demo)

Björk
Unison 
Royal Opera House
16 / 12 / 2001

Björk - Unison (Royal Opera House)

Recorded at State of Art Bristol with Beak>

I Go to Sleep

New York Grief is a nocturnal new wave incantation for the sleepless metropolis by Montréal singer, filmmaker, painter, and poet, Princess Demeny. In the early 80’s Princess started creating music for her poetry and in 1986, she partnered with Jean Mineau, her then boyfriend, who did the arrangements on what was to be her first EP, Distant Voices. Not long after the start of their collaboration, Jean was diagnosed with terminal cancer and was immediately hospitalized. Against the doctor's wishes, Jean left to record demos of five songs including New York Grief. He sadly passed shortly after returning to hospice and the recordings were never released.

“New York Grief was inspired by several trips to New York City in the mid eighties. I was in love with the city's nightlife. At times, I would stay awake and watch the city that never sleeps as its night creatures came out to play, and I would watch as they would vanish, replaced by the suited nine-to-fives, waking up and starting the machine of the metropolis madness again and again. It felt to me as though, in New York, there was more darkness by day than at night. I felt the city's intense rhythms and the chaotic pulse of the urban grind. It made me question if, sometimes, I was awake or still sleeping. I would have vivid dreams; horrific nightmares of burning buildings and people running and even though it was exhilarating, it also scared me.”

In 1989, Princess recorded a new version of New York Grief with arrangements by the Montréal new wave group Vini Vidi Vici. She also produced and directed a music video for it, which evokes both Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky, but set in ultra-cool nouvelle vague Montréal in the late 80s. Both the demo and 1989 version are featured on this 7” release with a bonus digital track of her cover of Listen, The Snow Is Falling by Yoko Ono. This single is a glimpse of the alluring universe of Princess Demeny, with more revelations on the horizon. 

Limited 250 pressing. No repress.

Tracklist:

A1 New York Grief (4:00)
B1 New York Grief ’86 (3:16)
*Digital Bonus: Listen, The Snow Is Falling

Purchase the vinyl here: https://www.seance-centre.com/shop/princess-demeny-new-york-grief

Purchase the digital here: https://princessdemeny.bandcamp.com/album/new-york-grief

New York Grief (24SC)

B1. Princess Demeny - New York Grief '86 (24SC)

FatCat Records is a British independent record label founded in 1997.

Vashti Bunyan-If I Were (Demo, 2001)

FatCat Records

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