The Orielles announce details of their new album ‘Tableau’ and brand new track ‘Beam/s’ with a visually impressive video.

31/08/2022

“Tableau is a double album that rewards serious immersion, as complex as it is diverse.”

The Orielles have announced details of their new album Tableau, a genuinely contemporary record which voyages far beyond the musical limits reached on their previous albums Silver Dollar Moment (2018), Disco Volador (2020) and La Vita Olistica.

Today, the band today shared ‘Beam/s’ a gorgeous 7-minute-53-second
piece of constantly shape-shifting celestial dream pop that heralds the truly extraordinary Tableau.

The track is accompanied by a visually impressive video co-directed by the band and Mackenzie AJ Thomson and produced by Jessica Wheeler who worked with the band previously on their acclaimed short film La Vita Olistica which recently appeared at both the Philadelphia International Film Festival and the Tokyo Lift Off Festival.

WATCH BEAM/S HERE

Talking about the track, Esme from the band said:

“This is a song that has travelled, grown and adapted with us through all of the seasons. This is why the lyrics kind of reflect that, the song reflects the changing of conditions. The warping of time, memories and relationships that you foster along the way. The original track was jammed at practice, Henry would bring his recording gear and it came about in quite an off the cuff way. I can’t remember how we really began jamming that. We further developed it whilst jamming at Eve Studios. We added distortion pedals and made it really big, but then going into the studio months later, maybe a year or more, we pared it back slightly. The majority of the song is just us in a room, a big room at that, which did the track a lot of justice. We wrote a visual score inspired by Wadada Leo Smith for this one, and then in the later half you hear the group percussion which is the final fallout of the song, and has nods to Afrobeat, where the majority of the song is taking this slowcore, emo feel to it. The track was originally titled Brian Emo.”

At the end of 2020, the Orielles – vocalist and bassist Esmé Hand-Halford, drummer Sidonie Hand-Halford and guitarist Henry Carlyle-Wade – regrouped to rehearse in Manchester, the city that the band have made their home across the last five years. When all of the band’s live dates to promote their second album were scrapped due to the pandemic, the group instead spent 2020 creating La Vita Olistica, a high-concept art film directed and written by the Hand-Halford sisters which they toured in cinemas across the following year, something which was the beginning of a series of creative breakthroughs that would result in Tableau…

…As well as the adoption of contemporary 21st century production, the Orielles used concepts from the world of art and minimalism in creating Tableau. Sidonie had researched the graphic scoring method of Pulitzer Prize nominated trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith. They also utliised Oblique Strategies – the playing cards designed to aide creativity created by Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt in the early 1970s. “We’d been speaking about wanting to use them for ages, and then we found a set of cards at the studio in Eastbourne” explains Sidonie, “before each song, we’d pick out a card and that would be our motif for playing that take.”

The result is a double album that rewards serious immersion, as complex as it is diverse. Though Tableau is likely to challenge preconceptions, this is something the band suggest they have been doing for quite some time anyway. “All through our whole career we’ve had to prove ourselves so, so much” explains Henry. “You can’t disconnect the age and the gender thing either” adds Esmé, “People belittle your age because they see women in the band. Whereas lad bands, if they’re eighteen it’s apparently exactly what people want to see.” Being from a small town in West Yorkshire may have added to that also, but Sidonie counters that “being from Halifax has also been a blessing, it’s kept our egos in check.”