Hen Ogledd share, 'Clara', the second taster from their confounding and haunting third album, DISCOMBOBULATED, – due February 20 via Weird World.
‘Clara’ flickers like a degraded film reel, the pastoral idyll haunted by spoil-heaps and smouldering seams. A horse trots through the North East’s Clara Vale, but the ground beneath collapses: subsidence, sinkholes, embers glowing beneath dreich water. The mining landscape becomes both mare and mire – Christmas coal ringing like sleigh bells under a disco ball of warning. On ‘Clara’, Hen Ogledd are joined by Will Guthrie (drums, percussion), Faye MacCalman (saxophone, clarinet), Chris Watson (recording of horse snorts) and Laura Phillips (recording of projector), with the aforementioned sleigh bells coming courtesy of Dawn Bothwell.
The video for ‘Clara’ is directed by James Hankins and shows Clara riding through a psychedelic and surreal journey of medieval texts, Alltwalis, carrot fingers alongside Knightmare, Atari and other 90s computer game imagery.
Listen to ‘Clara’ on Sport Playlists New Releases.
Hen Ogledd is the collaborative project of artists Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington. Named after the Welsh term for ‘The Old North’, the historical and political region encompassing what is now northern England and southern Scotland during the Early Middle Ages – coalesced slowly in the middle of the last decade. Davies and Dawson first began collaborating in 2013, but Hen Ogledd did not come fully into being until Pilkington and Bothwell were both involved ahead of 2018’s debut album proper, Mogic.
By turns emphatic and vulnerable, subtle and direct, joyous and furious, DISCOMBOBULATED is as strange, complex and moving a record as we have come to expect from Hen Ogledd. It’s perhaps their most complex and emotionally charged record to date, involving meditations on political tumult, personal crisis and mental wellbeing in a world gone mad, yet also their most warmly inclusive and accessible.
Additionally, Hen Ogledd have announced a special listening event on February 14 at Newcastle’s Star and Shadow Cinema to celebrate the impending release of DISCOMBOBULATED. The event will feature a full album playback illustrated by three part film odyssey by James Hankins, an audience Q&A, karaoke and a DISCO. Hen Ogledd welcome you to choose their fruity feast over salty gammon and join a dance contagion to release frustration this mid-winter.
