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Dave Harrington Announces New Album, Will Feature Nicolas Jaar + More

Dave Harrington, best known for his collaboration with Nicolas Jaar as DARKSIDE, has announced a brand new project, The Dave Harrington Group. A new album titled Become Alive is set to be released next month, and will feature a number of his “favourite musicians and closest friends” – which, yes, includes Nicolas Jaar.

In a statement Harrington talks about the formation and sound of the Dave Harrington Group, describing it as more improvisational jazz. He explains:

This record is the result of improvising with different combinations of people, and then processing and re-sculpting those improvisations—isolating passages, turning them into something new, overdubbing layers of myself, maybe taking something from another piece and superimposing it out of its original context. But each track is always me interacting with other people, sometimes just one or two… sometimes ten. There was flute, vibes, organ, Fender Rhodes, guitar, bass, two drummers, percussion, sax… just full-on, over-blown energy. I took all that and treated it as raw material in the mixing stage… but when you have ten people in a room, you can only edit so much. Everything is in every microphone anyway—it’s all connected, so it’s about turning it into whatever it wants to be.

Listen to the album’s title track below:

Reflecting on DARKSIDE, Harrington also explained how it influenced the new project:

I used to be someone who didn’t really care about recording. I would play house parties, free jazz in art galleries, whatever. All live, all the time… When we started DARKSIDE, that’s when I became really excited about making a record and started seeing recording and working in the studio as a creative outlet. Then, I got really inspired by that specific moment in history when jazz improvisation meets studio technique, the late ’60s, early ’70s—and I just wanted to get a bunch of close friends together to play.

Become Alive will be released April 15 via Nicolas Jaar’s own label Other People.

Tracklist:
1. White Heat
2. Slides
3. The Prophet
4. Cities of the Red Night
5. Steels
6. Become Alive
7. Spectrum
8. All I Can Do

Image: Consequence of Sound