Tulipomania - I've Been Told (Sursumcorda Records)

I have to say that I’m pretty excited about this one before I even drop the virtual needle on the digital record. Not just because I’m already a big fan of Tulipomania but because I’m also an avid reader of Jeff Vandermeer.

With Tulipomania’s music helping to drive Absolution’s creative flow, the surprise fourth novel in Vandermeer’s acclaimed Southern Reach series, he invited the band to create some music inspired explicitly by his then-work-in-progress. An artistic synergy was born, with the author and the band inspiring each other to achieve their individual but intertwined works.

Having read his writing and heard their music, it is easy to see why the bond was made – “I’ve Been Told” is the pulsing and writhing, muscular and oblique, cold and otherworldly sonic reflection of the creatures and landscapes that make the Southern Reach books such a rich and rewarding, ornate and original experience.

Tulipomania has always made music that feels like both of this world and yet not, an alien presence in a more mundane land, their strange, hypnotic ways, and often indefinable sonics like nothing you have heard before. The perfect soundtrack to the alien enclave of The Southern Reach (or the strange city of Ambergris or the post-apocalyptic world of Dead Astronauts.)

Vandermeer’s worlds and Tulipomania’s music can now, for me at least, never be anything other than two halves of a whole.

PS: I’ve just ordered the book, you should too, and you know what music to have on in the back ground when you read it.

Bandcamp
Spotify
Absolution album order
Apple Music
Jeff VanderMeer ‘Absolution’ book
Facebook
Instagram