Moses Sumney has announced a new live album, Live from Blackalachia, and performance film, Blackalachia, both due out December 10 via his creative label Tuntum. They feature "re-imagined, dynamic band arrangements" of songs from his LPs, his fantastic 2017 debut Aromanticism and 2020's excellent double album græ, that he recorded in the Blue Ridge Mountains with his band.
Moses says:
In early 2020, my band and I gathered in my home in Western North Carolina, living and breathing together, re-arranging songs from my first 2 albums into a live odyssey. As the year unfurled and the international tour was wiped off the cosmic schedule, I realized there should be some kind of record, a copper snapshot of those musical arrangements and the turmoil and beauty of that year. So we took to the Appalachian mountains and filmed and recorded Live From Blackalachia.
The band congregated in the heat of a lulled summer, with a mere 10 days to learn and re-learn the music. Drums, keys, guitars, double bass, violin, saxophones, trombone. Bees, birds, squirrels, crickets, frogs. Over the course of two days, we filmed 14 songs, totally live, the trees as our audience, the grasshoppers our background singers.
Live from Blackalachia is a wild imagining of what can happen when we seek not just to reclaim nature, but to re-integrate with it.
The first single is "Bystanders (in space)." Moses directed the video, and Cristina Dunlap did the cinematography. Watch it below.
Moses Sumney - Live From Blackalachia Tracklist
1. insula
2. Virile
3. Conveyor
4. Quarrel
5. In Bloom (in the woods)
6. space nation race place
7. Colouour
8. Plastic
9. Bless Me
10. Cut Me
11. Bystanders (in space)
12. Me in 20 Years
13. Doomed
14. Polly
