NEW ALBUM, THE LOVE IT TOOK TO LEAVE YOU, OUT SEPTEMBER 13TH VIA ENVISION RECORDS
“The Six” is the second single and track from Colin Stetson’s upcoming album The love it took to leave you. Recorded over a week in early 2023 at The Darling Foundry, a 144-year old former metalworks facility in Montreal now transformed into a 3500m3 contemporary art complex, with a voluminous main room that still maintains its raw architecture of brick, concrete, and steel.
From the album’s opening scene Stetson charts a carefully sequenced ride, travelling through intense territories punctuated with tragic melodies that seek transcendence, epic and frenzied shredders, and many shades of scary beauty, betrayal, and redemption.
“I see pieces of music that can be completely full narratives with characters and imagery and in a full plot; and then other times I think that they are more like directions. And so how long is the direction? It’s going, it starts, and it goes to a place—and it leaves you there. They are modes of transportation.”
Unclassifiable by nature, Colin’s pan-genre DNA is coded as much by classical and jazz, as metal, pop, rock, folk, and electronic music. Because The love it took to leave you is an origin story, situated on a timeline predating the New History of Warfare trilogy, he mined some foundational, formative elements for its creation. Stetson elaborates:
“I looked back at the nineties, probably 93, when I first started conceiving of my solo music, and started playing this way. I was thinking, okay, I’m gonna delve back into and really steep myself in the music that made me: early electronica, doom metal; and to counterbalance that whole aesthetic with my own personal musical history.”
The love it took to leave you comes out Friday, September 13, 2024 release via Envision Records in North America, and through Invada for the UK and the rest of the world.
Stetson is a force of nature life and he will be hitting the road next month and into the fall for a series of special performances. All dates are listed below.
Written some years ago but always intended as the cornerstone of an album, the first single and title track, “The love it took to leave you,” pulses into view from a forlorn and alien distance. Voiced through alto saxophone it sets a scene saturated with yearning—ruminating on the conflicted aches and oscillations that arise from love lost, the grasping, the collapse; and the rebuild, the struggle for dignity, self-compassion, and finally liberation. It’s a composition Colin’s been performing for several years, waiting for the right context to bring its full emotional and musical anatomy to life.
Another chapter in a larger odyssey inscribed through every solo recording, The love it took to leave you is a story told through the singular melding of Colin’s breath and body, with an arsenal of saxophones and clarinet. Resembling a yet to be published graphic novel, each track plots a course in an overarching tale that spins through a range of scenarios, moods, visions, and landscapes. This is the art of storytelling wrought instrumentally. His masterful catalog of film scores illustrate his profound knack for cracking the codes of music as narrative support—and as narrative embodied in his solo releases. Following last year’s When we were that what wept from the sea, a sort of sunset parable to the trilogy of albums he launched with New History of Warfare Vol. 1 in 2007—this one acts as a prequel, the origin story in his ongoing world-building dramaturgy. Fully conceived, but not formally written, he describes his elaborate storyline as a
“scaffolding to write around, offering a set of images, scenes and an overall story arc, it gives the music shape and emotional contour. It’s not simply just offering up an aesthetic.”
Vulnerable and ferocious all at once, the album is a full-throttled culmination of decades of technical, physical, and creative labour between a man and his saxophone. Colin has completely re-contextualized and re-articulated the instrument in passionately expressive and unorthodox ways. Dedicated to an absolute reality of the moment in his solo recordings: one-take, no virtual effects, no overdubbing, he’s developed meticulous modes of recording and production that capture and amplify every minute detail of his astonishing playing style. Entangled with his own physical body, he coaxes songs from his instrument using virtuosic circular breathing techniques that produce polyphonic overtones, creating otherworldly and affective harmonic passages. With an array of microphones and exaggerated sonification, his voice is captured by a dog collar device on his throat, and the noise and rhythm of the finger keys and pads become enhanced percussive elements—as he stretches the amplification possibilities of the entire horn.
Admittedly his most fully realized work, The love it took to leave you is a perfect storm of technical, musical, and compositional complexity and achievement.
“The essence of it is me. It’s the most personal thing that I do—and can do. There’s an evolution of my body and technical capabilities that keeps on, so every time I make another record, there are things that I could only have played now.”
TOUR DATES
August 21, 2024 New City Gas, Montreal QC (MUTEK Montreal, 25th Anniversary)
September 2024 North American West Coast Tour
September 7, 2024 Vancouver, BC Christ Church
September 8, 2024 Seattle, WA TBD
September 9, 2024 Portland, OR Mississippi Studios
September 10, 2024 Portland, OR Mississippi Studios
September 12, 2024 San Francisco, CA Great American Hall
September 14, 2024 Los Angeles, CA El Rey Theater (Album Release Show)