The Orielles Share New Track 'The Room'

The Orielles have shared brand new track and video for "The Room", the latest to be taken from their forthcoming new album Tableau, a genuinely contemporary record which voyages far beyond the musical limits reached on their previous albums Silver Dollar Moment (2018), Disco Volador (2020) and La Vita Olistica (2021).

Talking about "The Room", Sidonie of the band said: "This was the first track for this record, completely randomly and not part of the album sessions. It was recorded in Autumn/Winter of 2020, at Eve Studios. We had spent a day there, just jamming ideas. Obviously we'd spent the past five or six months in lockdown, not really able to spend much time with one another, so we were all bursting with ideas and hadn't jammed together in so long.

Obviously the way we write is very jammy, very reactionary with each other, and we really missed that. Putting us together in this room at Eve Studios, it was magical really. I feel like we wrote, or sketched ideas, for the majority of the record within an hour or two. We were just in this room at Eve with keyboards, modular synths, everything you could ask for, and just wrote loads of ideas.

The lyrics were written line-by-line by each of us, randomly, so we muddled them up and picked them up at random. The first lyric was 'the moon is in the room', and I believe she got that from a Clarice Lispector novel? The whispering was definitely inspired by bands like Portishead or Art of Noise."

The band added about the self-directed video: "'The Room' video is perhaps a visual representation of the way in which the song itself was written. Providing ourselves with limitations and instruments that are more unfamiliar to us (in the video's case, the Super-8). We thought that the lyrics and the vocal delivery lent themselves well to quite a literal video, we broke the song down line-by-line to create interpretations of the words and their meanings together. We really like the simplicity of this video, inspired by a lot of Agnes Vardas early works as well as Peter Tscherkassky's more avant-garde films."

The album will be released on October 7th, 2022 on Heavenly Recordings. Self-produced in collaboration with Joel Anthony Patchett (King Krule, Tim Burgess), it will be available as double-album vinyl edition, CD and DL and is available to pre-order HERE.

Watch the new music video here:

Also, having recently announced two very special shows in association with Piccadilly Records in Manchester and Rough Trade in London where they will be performing with full orchestral backing, the band have today announced details of a full U.K. headline tour next spring. The dates of the shows are as follows:

Tour Dates

10/7/2022 - Stoller Hall, MANCHESTER with orchestra (Piccadilly Records show)

10/8/2022 - EartH, LONDON with orchestra (Rough Trade show)

3/22/2023 - MASH - CAMBRIDGE

3/23/2023 - Concorde 2 - BRIGHTON

3/27/2023 - The Loft - SOUTHAMPTON

3/28/2023- Clwb Ifor Bach - CARDIFF

3/31/2023 - The Foundry - SHEFFIELD

4/1/2023 - The Mill - BIRMINGHAM

4/2/2023 - Sugarmill - STOKE ON TRENT

4/4/2023 - Rescue Rooms - NOTTINGHAM

4/8/2023 - The Garage - GLASGOW

Tickets for the headline tour in 2023 go on sale on Friday September 23rd HERE.

The band will also be doing in-store playback / Q&A events in Manchester & London. Dates below:

9/20/2022 - Rough Trade East - LONDON (Q&A with Will Hodgkinson)

9/21/2022 - Piccadilly - MANCHESTER (Q&A with Tom Preece YUCK magazine)

Since forming in the West Yorkshire town of Halifax, over a decade ago while still in their early teens, the Orielles have journeyed from lo-fi DIY indie origins to Stereolab and A Certain Ratio inspired avant-pop even directing and scoring their own experimental film and now, with their new album they've created a genuinely modern record - an experimental double album which utilizes holistic jazz practices, oblique 21st century electronica, experimental 1960s tape loop methods, otherworldly AutoTuned vocal sounds, the downer dub of Burial, Sonic Youth's focus on improvisation and feedback, and Brian Eno's legendary Oblique Strategy cards.

At the end of 2020, the Orielles - vocalist and bassist Esmé Hand-Halford, drummer Sidonie Hand-Halford and guitarist Henry Carlyle-Wade - regrouped to rehearse in Manchester, the city that the band have made their home across the last five years. When all of the band's live dates to promote their second album were scrapped due to the pandemic, the group instead spent 2020 creating La Vita Olistica, a high-concept art film directed and written by the Hand-Halford sisters which they toured in cinemas across the following year, something which was the beginning of a series of creative breakthroughs that would result in Tableau.

One such breakthrough came when the Orielles were booked to host a monthly show on Soho Radio. Broadcasts quickly became impromptu research and development sessions for the ideas that would feed into the album.

"Doing that monthly meant we had a reason to meet up and bring two hours of music between us which we'd play, discuss, hold physically and share" says Henry. "We were listening to much more contemporary music than before" adds Esmé.

A further breakthrough came while remixing another band's track in a studio in Goyt, on the edge of Stockport. This became the Goyt method, a central idea behind Tableau. "To Goyt it" explains Sidonie, "that's getting all these pieces and rearranging them. We had vocal melodies and ideas that we'd then run through and sample, and play them on sample pads. We were being editors, really."

Where the band had previously only gone into the studio once songs had been tightly crafted at the demo stage, the Orielles began to consider new practices in line with the modern sound they were aspiring to. No demo's. Heavy improvisation. And no producer - only the band collaborating with friend and producer Joel Anthony Patchett.

The album would be mostly recorded across Summer 2021 holed away in the Sussex coastal town of Eastbourne. Its recording is a story of experimentation, improvisation and a band discovering how to create an entirely new sonic palette.

As well as the adoption of contemporary 21st century production, the Orielles used concepts from the world of art and minimalism in creating Tableau. Sidonie had researched the graphic scoring method of Pulitzer Prize nominated trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith. They also utilized Oblique Strategies - the playing cards designed to aide creativity created by Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt in the early 1970s. "We'd been speaking about wanting to use them for ages, and then we found a set of cards at the studio in Eastbourne" explains Sidonie, "before each song, we'd pick out a card and that would be our motif for playing that take."

The result is a double album that rewards serious immersion, as complex as it is diverse. Though Tableau is likely to challenge preconceptions, this is something the band suggest they have been doing for quite some time anyway. "All through our whole career we've had to prove ourselves so, so much" explains Henry. "You can't disconnect the age and the gender thing either" adds Esmé, "People belittle your age because they see women in the band. Whereas lad bands, if they're eighteen it's apparently exactly what people want to see." Being from a small town in West Yorkshire may have added to that also, but Sidonie counters that "being from Halifax has also been a blessing, it's kept our egos in check."

Perhaps more than any of this, though, Tableau is also simply the product of the unique telepathy between three singular musicians that have grown in symbiosis for over a decade now - simply the three of them in a room.

"As creators, for the fact we've produced it ourselves, it feels like a starting point" suggests Esmé, "even though everything that's going previously has counted, this now feels like Ground Zero." For the future, now, it's all gates open.

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