Flailing Tomb Petrels

• 1 We Are Falling into the Heart of the Sun 08:58
• 2 Thangen After Dothe 04:41
• 3 Orpheus 08:23
• 4 L. Caution, Pt. 1 05:15
• 5 L. Caution, Pt. 2 07:35
• 6 L. Caution, Pt. 3 09:13
• Total Runtime 44:05

Info for Flailing Tomb

Petrels returns with a thunderous new album, „Flailing Tomb“. Taking the exhilaratingly huge sonic expanse that Petrels has become known for and pushing it further still, Flailing Tomb draws on a breathtaking sonic palette of influences and instrumentation to craft perhaps the strongest Petrels release to date.

Flailing Tomb's underlying theme is a many-layered obsession with and joyous celebration of the defiance in persisting with lost causes. Building on the mythological foundations of previous albums Haeligewielle, Onkalo and Mima Flailing Tomb takes an underlying current that ran beneath each of these and pushes it to the fore. Flailing Tomb draws inspiration from sources as wide-ranging as Ursula K. Le Guin's speculative fiction, Indian-Celtic connections, self-mummification, Jude The Apostle (patron saint of lost causes), and Jean-Luc Godard's seminal sci-fi masterpiece, Alphaville (much of the second-half of the album is adapted from music originally written as an alternate score to the film), weaving all this and more into six intricately-layered parts - at once forthright and ambiguous.

With a much broader range of instrumentation and contributors than previous Petrels albums from the melodic cacophony of album opener We Are Falling Into the Heart Of The Sun, to the euphoric choral backdrop of Orpheus with a lead vocal from NEVER SOL and the epic motorik finale of L. Caution Flailing Tomb is both an expansion on and refinement of the Petrels sound and an album that confirms the arrival of a singular artist.

Petrels is the solo project of London-based musician and illustrator, Oliver Barrett. Since releasing his debut Haeligewielle in 2011, Petrels has toured across Europe and shared a stage with the likes of Tim Hecker, FIRE!, Nate Young (Wolf Eyes), Trouble Books, Demdike Stare, Nadja, and Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Cluster). Having also collaborated with and provided remixes for artists as varied as Duane Pitre, Brassica, Talvihorros and Max Cooper, Petrels' output is proving to be thrillingly eclectic and unpredictable.

Petrels (aka Oliver Barrett)
is the solo project of Oliver Barrett of Bleeding Heart Narrative. His sound is a deluge of beautiful noise and crushing melody, which ebbs and flows beneath the surface. Utilizing bowed strings, bent electronics, found percussion and occasional vocals, his sound tells a forgotten story, buried underneath the stones and water.

'Petrels has provided us with what has to be the strongest solo debut from a musician so far in 2011. It’s as if Barrett has launched his solo career as Petrels by giving us his own Sisyphus narrative, and somehow it sounds dreadfully authentic – no small feat. Haeligewielle is an album so dense and immersive you sometimes feel as though you are drowning or being smothered, but that’s exactly the way it’s supposed to feel.' (Brendan Moore, Fluid Radio)

'Haeligewielle (holy well, sacred spring) is an album of creation and destruction, holiness and human honor. Its characters and etimologies dance around each other like fish in a waterspout. The album is a masterpiece of narrative, a blackened ship with a broken mast that defies the storm and in so doing discovers its own dark destiny.' (Richard Allen, The Silent Ballet (8.5/10))

'Haeligewielle is Oliver Barrett’s (also of Bleeding Heart Narrative) first solo album as Petrels. It is a song of water, a song of stone. These two elements form the album’s thematic core, entwined in the story of the central figure of William Walker, the Winchester diver; but they also inform the album’s sonic makeup – onrushing, buoyant, coursing and at times dense and abrasive. It’s a record that excavates, and extrapolates outwards from, a particular and resonant historical undertaking and in its jubilant expansiveness grants it mythic, numinous life.' (Matt Poacher, The Liminal)

This album contains no booklet.