Composer John Bence explores alcoholism and addiction on striking new album Love, due out Nov 13th

Visionary composer John Bence has announced new album Love, due out November 13th on Thrill Jockey Records. Following acclaimed releases for Yves Tumor's Grooming label and Nicholas Jaar's Other People imprint, Love forms the final chapter in a series of works that chart Bence's struggles with alcoholism and addiction, and his subsequent journey to recovery. Returning to his first love, the piano, Bence explores the instrument's deeply emotional qualities in ten movements. Love's stark minimalism and raw production reflect the composer's personal struggles with striking honesty, searching for the deeper meaning in human suffering.

Ahead of the release of Love, Thrill Jockey will be giving Bence's visceral masterwork Kill its first worldwide release on August 21st. Hailed by Boomkat as "a shocking three part movement for vocals, cello and bellicose drums that should leave no one uncertain of [Bence's] talents" and "quite unlike anything else we heard in 2018", the original private pressing of the record via Grooming sold out in a matter of minutes, a testament to the sheer originality and raw emotive power of the composer's work.

John Bence uses music to probe the deepest recesses of the human psyche. Over a handful of releases the composer has already built up a striking body of work bound by an incredible clarity of vision. His elegiac works occupy an omnivorous sound-world, assimilating elements of British avant-garde and electronic music, classical tradition and sacred medieval song into cavernous, sepulchral compositions. Love was Bence's first release written in sobriety. He explains: "After finally getting sober in January 2018, even thinking about composing anything but works for solo piano seemed too big of a job. I was so emotionally raw without the booze, I just hunched over the keyboard, sober eighteen months, until Love was born". Making powerful use of silence and space, Love's free-flowing structure and unvarnished textures present Bence at his most open and vulnerable, giving the impression of being sat at the piano with him through those trepidatious first steps into a sober life.

Listen to the title track from John Bence's Love:
https://johnbence.bandcamp.com/track/love

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