Published
Wed, May 24, 2017, 04:10
- The London experimental artist's first LP came out today.
Londoner Benedict Drew released his first proper full-length via Mana today.
Even if he's not a household name in the music world, you may have come across Drew's visual work, such as his De Re Touch project, which was commissioned by Art on the Underground and installed in the London Underground. He also worked as a producer within the experimentally-minded London Musicians' Collective for a decade, and has collaborated with the likes of Rhodri Davies, Chris Watson and Sachiko M over the years.
While he recently released a live recording of a Cafe Oto performance as well as a cassette called Dreamspace Of The Burger King Commuter via patten's Kaleidoscope imprint, Crawling Through Tory Slime serves as his debut album. It comes through Mana, a recently launched label run by Andrea Zarza, a curator at the British Library Sound Archive, and Blowing Up The Workshop founder Matthew Kent.
Explaining the album's title, Drew says: "It's a kind of image, this country submerged in sticky gloop excreted by the neo-liberal machine. And us crawling around half-blind through the sludge searching for refuge under a huge mountain of ill-fitting Primark clothes. We nest in the synthetic fibres gasping for breath."
Drew's solo exhibit The Trickle Down Syndrome is on display at London's Whitechapel Gallery all summer. It features works made simultaneously to the Mana album.
Listen to clips from Crawling Through Tory Slime.
Tracklist
A Side A
B Side B
Mana Records released Crawling Through Tory Slime on May 23rd, 2017.