New album inspired by ‘Annihilation‘ author’s new novel
Anyone familiar with bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer’s epic ‘Southern Reach‘ trilogy – and that’s over a million readers in the USA alone, not to mention the millions who will have watched Alex Garland’s 2018 film ‘Annihilation‘ which was loosely based on the first book of the trilogy – will be excited to learn that a fourth novel, ‘Absolution‘ has just been published.
But possibly not as thrilled as Philadelphia based art/electronica duo Tulipomania (Tom Murray and Cheryl Gelover), who discovered that VanderMeer became obsessed with their 2023 album ‘Dreaming Of Sleep‘ while writing ‘Absolution‘, to the extent that lyrics from the album were bleeding into his writing.
”It felt like a revelation – hypnotic, pulsing music that got deep hooks into my brain, so I couldn’t stop listening to the songs,” he says on the liner notes for a new version of the album, called ‘Absolution‘. “Like a lighthouse’s roving light, the songs felt like a beacon, and the recursive nature of the composition, the sense of a beating heart, a thick muscle at the core of them, combined with the surreal lyrics got deep into the novel’s DNA.”
“In a world where climate change deniers also assert the government can control the weather for their own political gains, Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X feels only 15 minutes in the future – or is that the past?” says Tulipomania’s Tom Murray, referencing the mysterious zone at the heart of the novel.
Cheryl Gelover adds, “The Southern Reach series, penned by the author crowned ‘the Weird Thoreau‘, eerily begins to feel more prescient than implausible. In the often-exhausting self-assigned task of responding to these and endless streams of absurdities, it’s a pleasure to find an opportunity for creative cross-pollination and quite an honour to join Jeff VanderMeer on his return journey to Area X – and then to find that the soundscape we created in response to such a masterful narrative has been received with such enthusiasm – hardly to be hoped for, and so, enormously satisfying”.
Jeff VanderMeer fondly describes the animated video for ‘I’ve Been Told – Absolution‘: “The dreamlike immersion in imagery from the novel creates a hypnotic and perfect effect for both a beautiful dirge and surge of a song and the atmosphere for ‘Absolution‘. Gorgeous and evocative“.
Shot frame by frame, utilising multiple processes, including thermal printing, to create layered textures, the video features stop-motion animated objects (some frames vibrantly hand-tinted) and glimpses of the duo singing the lyrics. This exploration of various states of disintegration, painstakingly assembling thousands of individual images, evokes the themes of dissolution and disorientation in ‘Absolution‘.
The album’s out at the end of November, and in the meantime here is the video premiere of the track ‘I’ve Been Told – Absolution‘, with Tulipomania’s unique video style of meticulously constructed abstract art imagery, previously commissioned by Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder, as well as Tulipomania’s own back catalogue.
‘Absolution‘ by Tulipomania is out on 29 November on Sursumcorda Recordings. VanderMeer’s novel ‘Absolution‘ is out now, published by 4th Estate.