Badwan / Coxon have announced details of the release of a 12” on Tough Love Records featuring 15-minutes of music over 2 tracks, Boiling Point and Promise Land.
A collaboration between Faris Badwan (The Horrors / Cat’s Eyes) & renowned guitarist John Coxon (Spring Heel Jack / Spiritualized / Treader), it is the first release of an ongoing collaborative series between Faris and other artists, details of which will be subsequently announced.
Badwan & Coxon met some years ago when Faris was looking for producers to work with on his solo material and their working relationship evolved beyond the existing songs into something more improvisational and instinctive. As Faris explains:
The new songs we ended up working on were largely spontaneous and cut together from early takes with minimal overdubbing. The lyrics were improvised and the focus was placed more on creating atmosphere and keeping things fairly raw and expressive. I guess I found it rewarding particularly with the guitar playing because it was so intuitive and completely free from any expectations of how a song should be constructed. There are hooks and repetitive sections but fewer traditional structures.
We tried to avoid doing any planning beforehand and focussed more on responding to what was happening in the moment. I guess the sessions were kind of a constant dialogue where we would each respond to the other’s improvisation.
With Promise Land I began by improvising lyrics over a drone track John and I created. Some time later I came across “To Our Land” by Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian poet, and was struck by the similarities – there are a few lines that match really closely. Despite being half-palestinian myself this was a total accident and I know for sure I hadn’t seen Darwish’s piece before.
With Boiling Point the lyrics are almost the ghost of a narrative rather than an explicit story. I’m interested in the subconscious and how the hidden parts of your brain express themselves when given the opportunity. Looking back it was almost more about creating the right conditions for the subconscious to come out.
Boiling Point / Promise Land is out on Tough Love Records on Friday 5th February 2021 on DL and as a limited edition (500) 12” which includes a very limited run of 100 copies with hand painted sleeves by Faris which are available via Bandcamp. In keeping with the approach of the music, each design was improvised and instinctive. Faris added about the artwork:
What was interesting about it was the way the style of the designs naturally evolved as a result of having so many blank squares to fill – there’s a really clear development from start to finish – beginning with angular lines filling the sleeve and ending with smoother, more minimal abstract shapes responding to the existing sleeve design. It ended up almost like a process-based art project where you work repetitively within really strict confines and let the results emerge organically.
