Composer/Vocalist M Lamar Collaborates with Hunter Hunt-Hendrix on New Album

Acclaimed Brooklyn-based composer/vocalist/pianist and visual/fine artist M Lamar creates music that crosses opera, metal and blues, and his diverse musical taste includes Diamanda Galas, Leontyne Price, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Burzum, Stephen O'Malley, and Wagner. Although he is a classically trained pianist and continues to study classical and bel canto voice technique, as he told "Impose" magazine in January 2016, "My connection to punk / goth / metal subcultures is huge. These are my people, this is my scene. That subculture is the thing that made me, that's where I come from, I'm still there." He recently received high praise for the January 13th and 14th NYC premiere of his multi-media concert, "Funeral Doom Spiritual", which was described by the "Wall Street Journal"'s Heidi Waleson as "...a noisy, honest power that is impossible to ignore." On the heels of the shows, Lamar will be releasing two new albums, "Funeral Doom Spiritual" and "Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche" tomorrow, 1/27.

Honest and raw in both his music and art, he has commented on the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, slave ships, and lynching. The new albums and performance of "Funeral Doom Spiritual" draw on themes of apocalypse, end times, and rapture found in Negro Spirituals, what he calls "Doom Spirituals." It explores radical historical expressions and futuristic longings for destruction of the white supremacist world order. "Funeral Doom Spiritual" is a song of mourning for what law professor Anthony Paul Farley calls "the motionless movement of death through slavery, segregation, and neo-segregation." With his use of music, multichannel video, objects, and still images, Lamar shows that it is only with an intense awareness of this "motionless movement," carrying the coffins of the fallen "on our backs," that we can proceed.

On "Funeral Doom Spiritual", all vocals and piano are performed by Lamar, and electronics and strings were written by Hunter Hunt Hendrix, the composer-philosopher-poet known primarily as the author of the text "Transcendental Black Metal" and as the guitarist, songwriter, and conceptual architect of the band Liturgy. Matthew Robinson from Opal Onyx played cello on the track "Carrying".

"I wanted to work with Hunter on this project because of his ideas about black metal and transcendentalism", he says. "Hunter's very American take on the European art form of black metal resonated with me so much because I have always been trying to grapple with European forms and filter them back through a black US musical tradition, starting with the spiritual. Indeed much of the inspiration for this record was looking at Negro Spirituals that focus on end times and the rapture. I was very interested in reading these doom day songs through a 21st century lens. I have called these 'the Doom Spiritual.'"

"Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche", was recorded with the Mivos Quartet, with string arrangements by composer/musician Charlie Looker (Extra Life, Psalm Zero) and features guitar by metal/avant-garde musician Colin Marston from acclaimed black metal bands Krallice and Gorguts. Lamar raves, "I am in love with the string arrangements by Charlie Looker which were performed brilliantly by Mivos Quartet! These collaboration have been a dream come true for me. I am in awe of both Mivos and Looker. They are the best of the best!!!"

The first single from "Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche" is "Legacies". "'Legacies' is a very important moment in the story of 'Surveillance Punishment and The Black Psyche'", he says. "This is the moment that the main character, a 17 year old black boy, realizes that the 53 year old white man with whom he was having a sexual relationship, is one of the klansmen who lynched and castrated his father. This video is also part of my forthcoming feature film."

You can check out the video for "Legacies" here:

https://vimeo.com/196229671

You can listen to the "Legacies" here:

https://soundcloud.com/m-lamar/legacies-m-lamar-mivos-quartet-featuring-charlie-looker

As esteemed composer/vocalist/artist Diamanda Galas proclaimed after listening to a few songs from "Speculum Orum - Shackled to the Dead", Lamar's 2013 album, "THIS BITCH CAN SING!"

http://www.mlamar.com/

https://www.facebook.com/m.lamarmusic/