Saunder Jurriaans Announces New Album 'Phantom Limb'

For most any musician, the making of the sophomore record carries a certain weight: the hope to do it differently this time around and to make it even better can loom large over the creative process. 

For Ozark composer Saunder Jurriaans, he shrugs off these tropes in Phantom Limb, upcoming follow up to his much-acclaimed debut Beasts (Decca). It's announced today for a November 17th release via his own Ghost Talk Records imprint. On it, the LA-based multi-instrumentalist’s new songs explode with a looseness indicative of the artist’s ever-expanding musical knowledge and experience. 

Today he shares the first single "Everything Shines," a rhythmically playful yet brooding head-bopper. The song consists only of sounds made with the body – percussive effects come from snaps, claps, and slaps while the melodic elements are all layered vocals and whistles, processed to various degrees. An urgency and tension are brought on by rhythmic breaths and unexpected, melodic backing vocals throughout the track.

“Nothing is precious, but everything shines,” Jurriaans sings at the end of the song, a final atonal, stand-alone vocal harmony avoiding any traditional resolution. The 16mm ultra-slow motion video is directed and photographed by Los Angeles-based artist and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten, who also provided the album artwork. Tweeten's work is often noted for its strong imagery and lyrical visual style, which can certainly be seen here.

Jurriaans is usually operating in the mode of collaborator—he and his longtime friend, Danny Bensi, are an award-winning film scoring duo, lauded for their deeply effecting scores on hit television shows like Ozark and The OA. Feature films include Martha Marcy May Marlene, Enemy, and God’s Creatures, as well as provocative documentaries like Nat Geo’s LA 92 and HBO’s Tina Turner documentary, Tina. 

But on Phantom Limb, Jurriaans has done it all on his own: every song was written, performed and recorded by Jurriaans in his Highland Park studio, with J. Daniel Goodwin mixing and mastering the project.

Unsurprisingly for someone so busy composing and recording music for the screen, the studio has become a laboratory for far-reaching musical experimentation for Jurriaans:

“It’s kind of a chaos situation. Sometimes I’ll just come up with one part and I’ll call it a verse and go ahead and record it. I get impatient to move onto the vocal harmonies and the production, running things through the tape player and getting weird distortions and delays. That for me is really the best part: layering stuff when I’ve got the structure of a song down and I’m just building on what’s there. I’m not afraid to put anything on a song—horns, weird synths, percussion, vocal parts. And then I’ll ride that wave for a day or night and then the next day or a week later I’ll start to mute things—take things out—mix it down, move stuff around, cut and paste.”

From the creaking piano stool on the bare and plaintive “An Idea,” to the arena-ready cymbal bashes on “Los Angeles,” to the melodic finger picking on “Little Song of Death,” to the pulsing electro-rhythms on “Eyes of Fire,” each song has a way of making an announcement at the start (about yearning, anger, acceptance and pent-up feeling, respectively.) 

The three instrumental tracks “Afternoon Rain,” “Ovulos,” and “Her Ghost,” are indicative of the film-scoring influence on Jurriaans’ music, providing moments of moody respite amongst the more epic songs. “‘Her Ghost’ is a bit of an ode to the late composer/pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, whose complex, lyrical melodies deeply influenced me.”

Throughout Phantom Limb, no song ends up where it began, with all ten tracks setting out on a journey all their own, both unpredictable and rich. Music-making without constraints, songs without predetermined destinations, giving every idea a chance to live—taken on a whole, this is the philosophy on which Phantom Limb exists.

Jurriaans and Bensi are releasing the record on their brand new label, Ghost Talk Records. While intending to put out their own non-film scoring work, they also aim to release some film scores, as well as past soundtracks that didn’t get a proper release. “We’ve done the music for so many smaller films which might not have done well theatrically but that we’re really proud of. We want that music to be out in the world. And then the bigger idea is to create a conduit for us to quickly and easily keep releasing our own music.”

Phantom Limb is out November 14th on Ghost Talk Records.

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