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RAVEN BUSH announces debut album

• 29th Apr 2021

Margate-based producer Raven Bush has announced his debut album ‘Fall Into Noise‘ is set for release August 13th via PRAH Recordings. The first single from the record “Start of Something New” is streaming online now.

‘Fall Into The Noise‘ is a record that looks to document living in the moment, allowing listener to find their own meaning in the results and the music to speak for itself, which is testament to Raven’s experimentation with sound and freedom of expression as an artist.

Speaking about this first single, Raven said “‘Start of Something New’ was the first track that was made and completed on ‘Fall Into Noise’. It all emerged from some chords I recorded as a voice note whilst playing the piano at my dad’s house.”

To accept that chaos is constant isn’t easy, but reconciling that idea can result in a sense of freedom. For producer and composer Raven Bush, it’s embracing that things simply are and that you can control only yourself within it that’s allowed him to thrive. Fall Into Noise is his debut LP for PRAH after two previous EPS, and it revels harnessing chaos as a positive, that it creates moments where no one path feels pre-ordained, and that it’s better to engage with what you can’t avoid than attempt a fruitless retreat.

“As a title, Fall Into Noise is about the acceptance of all that you can’t control” Raven explains. “I find it interesting that noise can be disconcerting to one, yet sublime for another. For one person a sound which makes them anxious, makes another aware of something mystical. I’m talking about uncontrollable forces and how we perceive them. A friend was telling me about how the thought of the ocean, with its unstoppable power that everyday just went in and out with the tides, was terrifying. everything just ‘is’ and it’s up to us to decide and embody meaning to it.

Of course it’s easy to say these things, but it’s always good to be reminded, I think.”

Fall Into Noise might be his first LP, but Raven Bush has made a career out of working within chaos, following paths that might not have immediately been there, and subsequently pushing his practice out into diverse fields. As a producer and violinist – an instrument he started playing as a two-year-old – he’s appeared on releases by everyone from Christine & The Queens and Ghostpoet to Kae Tempest. On stage, meanwhile, he’s performed with the likes of Mica Levi and the CURL collective, among many others.

It wouldn’t be right to call Fall Into Noise a culmination of all this – Raven is an artist who thrives on balancing simultaneous projects – but there was a pivotal show that provided the impetus for its creation. Many of the album’s tracks began as music performed last year at Funkhaus in Berlin for a show by choreographer Kiani Del Valle. One of three music producers working on the show, alongside Lotic and Floating Points, the challenge of fitting his music to dance felt like a natural fit and triggered a desire to further document it.

Recorded at his home studio in Margate, before being given a final stem mix by Ghostculture and then mastered by Rupert Clervaux, Fall Into Noise captures Raven’s giddy excitement at crossing this boundary. Rooted in techno, it pulls the fabric of that foundation apart to intertwine it with a rich, colourful sonic palette.

Tracks like opener “Factory of Light” have a breathless rush to them, with the tempo of the entire record rarely dropping below 135-140 BPM. There are moments that surge, and feel like sharp intakes of breath, but there’s also a sense of serenity due to the widescreen atmosphere of the production.

It also comes from his long-held interest in film scoring. In 2020 he worked with director Phillip Karminiak for a Nowness short film titled Cass & Lex, and the tension between the tenderness of his string work and the hard-hitting rhythmic drive of that material is something taken further here. Tracks such as “Start of Something New”‘s restless flutter of clean keys and manipulated vocal work, and “The Window” – where everything drops out to leave a yawning chasm flooded with yearning drones and intermittently flickering frequencies – it’s clear this is music written for moving image both real and imagined.

“Something like We Are Made of Stars, too, is an example of a track that in my head has a whole film to it” Raven furthers, citing the record’s third track, which slips in an out of different scenes at break neck speed, from 70’s sci-fi futurism, through crackling percussive clicks and whirrs and mechanical techno, to ascendant strings.

Raven’s strings frequently make an appearance throughout. It is, in many ways, his anchor and main voice given his history; yet despite his extensive string work across multiple projects, here it’s symbolic that on Fall Into Noise he allows it to nudge and compliment rather than hold centre stage. This is a debut album that above all else is about taking a creative leap into the unknown and embracing the horizons that he might find. Finding clarity amongst the chaos.

“I think everyone has something absolutely unique about them, you just need to keep carving away till you find the essence of what you want to say” Raven finishes. “For me I feel like this record is the first layer of that process.”