Will Gregory Moog Ensemble Share New Monitor Forward of Debut

The Sand Reckoner is the second monitor to be taken from their debut album launch, Warmth Ray, an album impressed by the work of Archimedes, the Greek mathematician and inventor who lived and labored within the third century BC. Hear right here.

The album – recorded by the ensemble on analogue synthesisers, alongside the BBC Nationwide Orchestra of Wales – is ready for launch on vinyl, CD and obtain on 14 June 2024 by way of Mute. Pre-order right here.

Following the earlier monitor, Younger Archimedes, The Sand Reckoner illustrates the album’s motion by means of Archimedes’ achievements – every extra fantastic than the following. Extra particularly is the scientist’s fearless curiosity dropped at the forefront of the undertaking with the tune as an homage to his try to work out the variety of grains that will match into the universe, ”which is simply insane”, Will says, ”but additionally superb, in that he needed to strategy these sorts of ideas…and it turned his car to introduce the world to actually giant numbers hitherto unimagined.”

The Will Gregory Moog Ensemble, which at instances includes as much as fourteen gamers, was shaped by Ivor Novello-winning musician, producer and co-creator of Goldfrapp, Will Gregory. Though they’ve been performing collectively since 2005, it took Archimedes to deliver the ensemble collectively to commit these spirals of melody, round buildings, sequences, and patterns to tape.

The album’s inspiration occurred throughout the pandemic lockdowns, when Will began digging into the mathematician’s life, after watching lectures on-line. “I turned a little bit of a YouTube fiend. Attending all these lectures I’d by no means usually go to on topics I had no enterprise to be excited by. Scratch any of those maths gurus and it turned out Archimedes was their favorite mathematician. I needed to seek out out why.”

The ensemble’s members – a proficient bunch who’ve labored with the likes of Florence & the Machine and Dua Lipa – embody Portishead’s Adrian Utley, a longtime collaborator of Will’s, who co-produced and performs on the album. Mute’s Daniel Miller is its ”sort of govt producer”, and he even performed on one of many tracks. ”Given he’s been into synths proper from his early days, and is a genius with them, that was a superb second”, alongside John Baggott, Graham Fitkin, Simon Haram, Vyvyan Hope-Scott, Ross Hughes, Hazel Mills, Daniel Moore, Hinako Omori, Eddie Parker, Harriet Riley and Ruth Wall, their devices embody Minimoog, Moog Voyager, Korg 700s, Prophet 6 and Roland JX3P, their particular person strains coming collectively in intricate preparations creating a shocking superstructure of sounds.

The album has been a humbling, joyful undertaking for the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble, and it continues to be, with Will enthusing, ”I imply, the data that these folks had. And likewise, the concept it solely takes one individual to completely leap the entire of civilisation ahead, take so many steps – it’s astonishing. And to assume that libraries have been burned, and a lot data was misplaced for millennia. It reminds us what we now have to carry onto.”

Warmth Ray takes the fertile creativeness and utility of these unimaginable instances, and provides an effervescent spirit of discovery to the combo, one that usually crackles and sparkles when musicians are powerfully impressed to make music collectively. One other legacy of Archimedes’ work rises up as a consequence – an album that brings historic historical past into the fashionable world, pushing us in direction of an endlessly curious fascinating future.

The brand new monitor is accompanied by information of a sequence of reside dates for autumn: Will Gregory Moog Ensemble shall be performing on the Hidden Notes competition in Stroud earlier than two performances with the Britten Sinfonia on the Barbican, London and in Saffron Walden.

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