Kenny Anderson - aka DIY pop voyager King Creosote - announces his new album and shares the single 'Blue Marbled Elm Trees'.
The Scottish musician’s latest record I DES will be released on November 3. The title is a reference to KC’s key collaborator this time around – multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Derek O’Neill aka Des Lawson, who also contributed to Kenny’s previous releases From Scotland With Love (2014) and Astronaut Meets Appleman (2016).
With a suitably beautiful video – directed by Reuben Sutherland – to match, ‘Blue Marbled Elm Trees’ reflects on life, death, the universe, art and love. “I shan’t complain,” Kenny rejoices on the album’s most uplifting hymn. “I had the best time laughing with my girls / I had the best life offered up / By this blue marble or any alien world.”
Listen to ‘Blue Marbled Elm Trees’ by King Creosote on the Shoot Music New Releases Playlist on Spotify.
Elsewhere on I DES, there are the previously released songs ‘Susie Mullen’ and ‘Walter de la Nightmare’ as well as the 36-minute ‘Drone in B#’. The record’s kaleidoscopic musical terrain plots vibraphones, accordions, e-bows, samplers, ungulates, pipes, scratched records and wine glass-drones across its landscape. But there’s common ground in the wonder of the synthesiser – not to mention Anderson’s singular voice, and his roguish, roving, ever-evolving, gorgeous songs in the key of Fife.
It’s tempting to assign KC’s rekindled love for ambient and modular kicks to sublime co-conspirator Jon Hopkins (2007’s Bombshell; 2011’s Mercury Prize-shortlisted Diamond Mine), but – more directly – it’s down to seeing Nils Frahm live in Edinburgh; to an enduring fascination with loops (“because we’re always going back”); and to a book by David Stubbs. “I started listening to drones and stuff again because I read Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany,” he offers.
The album was largely written between 2016 and 2020, but nothing is ever as simple as that: there’s something old (trees), something blue (also trees), something borrowed (home tapes and vocals from through the ages; lyrics from the distant past), and something new (KC quips that a potential title for this album was We All Got Synths for Christmas).
