Anna Meredith announces her eagerly anticipated second studio album, FIBS, due for release on the 25th October via Moshi Moshi.
The album is heralded by the release of ‘Paramour’, its first single and a song that forbids you from turning away – its sweeps, jerks and wrong turns pinning your ears to the speakers.
Arriving three and a half years on from the release of Award-winning debut studio album Varmints, ‘FIBS’ is 45 minutes of technicolour maximalism, almost perpetual rhythmic reinvention, and boasts a visceral richness and unparalleled accessibility.
FIBS is no “Varmints Part 2” — the retreading of old ground, or even a smooth progression from one project to another, just isn’t Meredith’s style. Instead, if anything, it’s “Varmints 2.0”, an overhauled and updated version of the composer’s soundworld, involving, in places, a literal retooling that has seen Meredith chuck out her old MIDI patches and combine her unique compositional voice with brand-new instruments, both acoustic and electronic, and a writing process that’s more intense than she’s ever known. Despite Meredith’s background and skills these tracks are no academic exercise, the world of FIBS is at both overwhelming and intimate, a journey of intense energy and joyful irreverence.
Prior to the release of Varmints, Meredith was already well known as a writer of music for other people, taking commissions from international orchestras, operas and cultural institutions, writing symphonies, songs and string quartets, exploring boomwhackers, beatboxing and body percussion, her music being heard at the Proms, in motorway service station flash-mob performances and on haute-couture catwalks. She has been Composer in Residence with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, regularly commissioned by orchestras around the world and the first femalecomposer to be commissioned for both the First and the Last Night of the Proms.
Meredith today also announces a full UK tour for February 2020, taking in seven dates, starting in Leeds on the 3rd February, and culminating in Brighton on the 10th .
See below for the full list of dates; tickets go on sale Friday 12thJuly at 10am. Before then, this summer she plays Visions Festival in London and Helsinki Festival.
