“Heart Map Rubric”, the new album from Brighton, UK outfit The Fiction Aisle, is that smooth easy going type of music that you want to listen to live in a private club with your Stinger on the rocks and a Davidoff Escurio slow burning in the “old school” brass ashtray on the one hundred year old oak table finely worn by the countless patrons enjoying the timeless legacy of tunes brought to you by all of the artists that led to the formation of The Fiction Aisle and that is when you’ve realized that you are the final link to what has come full circle in “Heart Map Rubric”. This album is a testament to how a dated sound can become a timeless art with the right artists.
“Heart Map Rubric” will be released on November 27th via the Chord Orchard label.
About The Fiction Aisle:
Drawing as much from the music of queer revolutionaries Alison Goldfrapp and Noël Coward as the lavish dream-world of American visual artist James Bidgood, The Fiction Aisle is the new full-band project from Brighton-based musician Thomas White. Formerly of psychpoppers The Electric Soft Parade and punk super group Brakes, White has perfected a knack for complex musical arrangement and maximalist melodic counterpoint, an approach that reaches its logical, mind-boggling conclusion with The Fiction Aisle’s audacious, sprawling debut album. With echoes of 1940s jazz at its most louche and lush, the 10-piece group infuses that seductive atmosphere with stark modern ambiance – skittish drum breaks, distant brass and layered guitars providing an unsettling backdrop for deeply personal ruminations on life and love.
In the wake of the final Electric Soft Parade album – 2013’s IDIOTSthere was a feeling that certain avenues had run their course – lyrically and musically White dreamed of a new approach, one that more fully conjured its own world, a world the listener could lose themselves in. Inspired by Frank Sinatra’s recording of London By Night, he set out to realise a new vision. Integrating the sumptuous romantic jazz of the early 20th century with unequivocally contemporary elements, Heart Map Rubric is a reckoning with, and a celebration of, polarities – illuminating the most forbidding recesses of our psyche, bathing in the ecstatic glow of love, to know and cherish all aspects of our selves without judgement.
The title and sleeve of the record allude to these ideas of inner and outer lives. The Keith Haring-inspired cover is an abstraction of the city of Brighton, also evoking the brain’s neural pathways; the title meaning “the notes one might make while navigating such terrain”. For 62 compelling minutes, The Fiction Aisle thread disparate themes into a complete whole – cavernous walls of distortion underpin meticulously arranged orchestral passages, lone voices emerge wide-eyed and pure amid the cacophony, the precise and exact in harmony with the vague and ambiguous, calling forth past eras yet pregnant with possibility in a bright, beautiful present.
Recorded in a series of intensive sessions between September 2014 and June 2015, with production duties shared by White and Paul Pascoe, Heart Map Rubric represents an uncompromising shift from a musician without peer, quietly asserting himself as one of the most challenging and rewarding songwriters working today.
SOURCE: Official Bio
LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/thefictionaisle
http://chordorchard.bandcamp.com/
