Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres has released “Dance”, the first single from her debut album 2 Years Stranger. The Bristol-based film composer spent two years in her family home while her father lay in a medically-induced coma, making recordings with her childhood piano.
Hamilton-Ayres’ experience in capturing atmosphere is on full display with “Dance”: the rough and raw recordings from the family piano inadvertently captured room noises like her piano bench scraping the wooden floor, while a typewriter-esque rhythm underlines the narrative function of the music she used to heal. There’s a clap, a quick clap that elicits movement and adds tension to a song set against the backstory of a man hovering between life and death.
The single comes ahead of the album’s November 20th release on Manners McDade (Nils Frahm, Max Cooper), the cover of which is a simple and powerful image of her father’s treatment mask, taken by the man himself. What’s more, a limited run of 150 ecomix 12” LPs can be preordered through Bandcamp; each vinyl in the run is pressed with the leftover pellets of previous runs, meaning each one is uniquely colored. A perfectly unique way to capture a perfectly unique artist.
Check out “Dance” on SoundCloud
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