Mick Harvey & Amanda Acevedo Release New Album 'Phantasmagoria In Blue'

Mick Harvey & Amanda Acevedo’s debut collaborative album, Phantasmagoria in Blue, is out now on vinyl, CD and digitally via Mute, and the duo launch their UK tour on September 13th with a performance in Leeds before dates across the UK, Ireland, Norway and Belgium.

Phantasmagoria in Blue is a 14-track album of duets, with Harvey and Acevedo bringing new life to songs which were sourced from existing duets, songs that were never intended as duets, translations from Spanish, songs sung in Spanish and a sprinkling of original compositions. The release will be followed by Harvey and Acevedo’s first live UK dates where they will be joined by J.P. Shilo and Berlin band Sometimes with Others for a musical phantasmagoria, presented as the Invisible Blue Unicorns. Full dates are listed below.

Mexican singer and filmmaker Amanda Acevedo met Mick Harvey several years ago in Mexico City while Harvey was on tour with P.J. Harvey, but it wasn’t until 2021 that their current project burst into life, as the pair shared musical and other ideas across the oceans and through the ether between Australia and Mexico.

After Acevedo initially suggested the collaboration, Harvey sent over some ideas and, as Acevedo explains, “The first recording we did was amazing, our voices matched very well”. Harvey expands, “…little by little it started to feel like something that could be an important project and gradually became the dominant focus for the following 18 months.”

Following their initial long distance collaborative work, Harvey and Acevedo met up in Los Angeles so that they could continue work in person. Harvey explains, “We aimed big, I wanted it to be a big production to match the level of ambition in the whole idea. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve been involved in, for a long time”.

In LA they worked with Alain Johannes (Eleven, Mark Lanegan, Queens of the Stone Age) recording most of the vocals at Norm Block’s Happy Ending studios in Silverlake. Late in 2022 they continued work in Melbourne, while also playing some shows in Australia together with J.P. Shilo (Hungry Ghosts, Rowland S. Howard) who is also featured on the album playing guitar and miscellaneous instruments. Harvey finished mixing the album and coordinated the mastering with local legend Mikey Young before Acevedo returned to Mexico.

Phantasmagoria in Blue is lush and sweeping in its emotional content and full of nourishment for the imagination and the senses, reworking and reinterpreting songs from artists as varied as Tim Buckley, Luis Eduardo Aute, Sibylle Baier, Silvio Rodriguez and Pat Benatar. Says Avecedo: “It was an unlikely connection and a very unlikely situation but it started working and has developed into a good friendship that I’m very grateful for. The album is a testimony to this.”

MICK HARVEY – EUROPEAN TOUR DATES

With Amanda Acevedo, J.P. Shilo and Sometimes with Others:

9/13/2023 - Leeds, UK - Old Woollen
9/14/2023 - London, UK - St. John on Bethnal Green
9/15/2023 - Cardiff, UK - The Gate
9/16/2023 - Colchester, UK - Art Centre
9/17/2023 - Liverpool, UK - IWF Substation
9/18/2023 - Dublin, IE - Grand Social
9/19/2023 - Belfast, IE - Black Box
9/20/2023 - Glasgow, UK - Mono
9/22/2023 - Oslo, NO - Haerverk - with J.P. Shilo 
9/23/2023 - Oslo, NO - Haerverk - with J.P. Shilo 
9/26/2023 - Antwerp, BE - Dinsdag Club

MORE ABOUT MICK HARVEY & AMANDA ACEVEDO:

Mick Harvey is renowned as a musician, record producer and composer who has been active for the last 45 years and is perhaps best known as a member of The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds and for his long term collaborative work with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave.

Aside from scoring a dozen feature films and numerous short films and documentaries, split almost evenly between Australia and Europe, Harvey has also released eight solo albums in the last two decades. He has also been honored as the recipient of several Australian industry awards including ‘AFI Best Original Score’ for Suburban Mayhem in 2006 and ‘Producer of the Year’ for his (co) production on PJ Harvey's Let England Shake in 2011.

This is Mexican artist Amanda Acevedo’s first project and sees her stepping out onto the international stage for the first time. After spending 2020/2021 studying film in her hometown of San Luis Potisí, Acevedo has teamed up with one of her heroes to create a thematically-rich collection of duets.

 Photo credit: Matthew Ellery

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