Group Listening

Musical collaborators for the past decade, Paul Jones and Stephen Black are together known as the woodwind-and-key-wielding, sculptural-papier-mâché-hat-wearing GROUP LISTENING.

They recently announced details of new album Walks; their first collection of completely original compositions, set to be released 10th May on PRAH Recordings.

Today, they share brand new single “New Brighton” and an accompanying music video.

“Stephen and I were up in Birkenhead to play a gig, and we went for an explore to the Wallasey seafront, along New Brighton beach. Quite a windy day if I remember correctly. Incredible views out to sea.

“Across the promenade and on to the old fort, then up to the pier house and back down again. We stopped at a chip shop, took in the salty air and felt all the better for it.

“It’s not recorded in standard tuning, it’s flatter than is usual. The lower tuning seemed to give it a character that suited its mood.” - Paul Jones

“Unlike our previous two records we knew we wanted to make an album of our own compositions. “New Brighton” was the first piece we worked on together and it opened up the door to new and exciting creative possibilities. We toured our last album heavily and found ourselves eating chips and talking music on the outskirts of the Wirral in a seaside town called New Brighton. There’s a nice, Martin Parr inspired photograph of us if I remember. We’re both big fans of his work.

“The music is somewhat of a departure from what we are known for. The core elements of piano and clarinet are still there but the music feels new and different. Futuristic but not modern maybe like New Brighton once was” - Stephen Black

Speaking of the music video, the duo add: “In this video for “New Brighton” by our friend the videographer Nic Finch, urban and rural elements dance in time with the music; abstract shapes pulse within a striped patchwork quilt of environments - depicting the connectivity between the rhythm of places and the memory of places. Nic used the original album artwork by Catrin James as inspiration and deconstructed the elements in those artworks to create the video."

“New Brighton” follows “Frogs”, which surfaced last month [listen / watch HERE] and was praised by The Guardian for its “muted woodwind, electric harpsichord and a soothing chorus of frogs into a wistful mood fit for a vexed romance.”

Group Listening have confirmed a full UK tour for May / June in support of Walks, and have since added festival dates for July / August. All dates are on sale now

About Group Listening and Walks:

Following renegade reinterpretation records Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol. 1 (2018) and Vol. 2 (2022), which pulled apart, pondered, and re-shaped cult ambient classics by the likes of Robert Wyatt, Arthur Russell and Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Walks (2024) is a shining modernist monolith buried deep in the woods.

Walks draws from the field recordings of Ernest Hood; the abstraction of Harold Budd; the saxophone of Sam Gendel; the “heightened naturalism” of a Martin Parr photograph; the clarity and site-specificity of Japanese ambient, environmental & new age music of the 80s and 90s, and, prominently, Robert Walser’s pseudo-biographical novella The Walk — an appreciation of the philosophical space gifted by walks to walkers.

“Some of the places are real, while others are invented. Many of them are from actual walks that Steve and I took - mostly when on the road while touring, between shows, exploring,” says Paul Jones.

“When we first starting touring with Group Listening, both Steve and I became fascinated with going on long walks between shows, so if we had a day off we would find somewhere en route to the next show and go on a long, often aimless adventure. Sometimes we’d also take a long city walk; from Hackney to Soho in London, or an exploration of Milton Keynes, taking in its green spaces as well as its utopian modernism.”

Jones continues: “These pieces were not imagined as companion pieces to listen to while visiting a particular location (although they certainly can be used in that way), but more as a layering of notions and thoughts for places visited - redrawn as music, conjurations of feelings evoked by place. Much of the music is a celebration of random movement, of dérivistic exploration. Wandering into the drift.”

An ode to the gently psychedelic potential of wandering around in some place, any place, every place: the places in one’s own mind, Walks invites you to listen and think; to slip through the fabric of time a little or a lot, depending on how long you’ve got. Over all, to paraphrase Walser, it invites you to glow and flower yourself in the glowing, flowering present.