Orbury Common

ORBURY COMMON exists as a place in the musical imagination of Emlyn Bainbridge and Josh Day-Jones: an opalescent, dream-like otherworld of fogged memory and refracted mythology. 

Having explored the frenzied nightlife of this place with The Traditional Dance of Orbury Common EP (PRAH Recordings, 2022), the Bristol / Stroud duo recently announced details of their debut album. Sylvan Chute will be released 7th June on PRAH, a panoramic overview of the world they have envisioned, a series of individual yet interwoven vignettes, a musical map of abstract melodramas.

Today, they share brand new single “Jaundice & The Pipermen”, with an accompanying music video directed by Jonah Kidd.

“This song began as a patchwork of musical ideas and mangled woodwind samples. My friend asked me ‘is Jaundice & the Pipermen about death?’, and I said ‘how can you be so crude?’. It’s a list of stuff I’ve seen around where I live, through a jaded lens, tossed up with some dreams and daydreams.

“I imagined passing through an endless misty plain where things I’ve seen in real life (which felt dreamlike) and things I’ve seen in dreams (which felt lifelike) coalesce and emerge from the mist.

“It’s about taking the scenic route to find clarity and unshrouding the mysteriously dark thoughts which occasionally enter the mind.” - Josh Day-Jones

Jaundice & The Pipermen” follows previous singles “Finer Scales” and the “The Resident”, the latter of which surfaced with a music video made by Alfie Dwyer (Aphex Twin,  Eric Andre et al).

Departing from the distorted club pulses of Traditional Dance…, we now hear subverted pop songs and surreal ballads, wherein earthy (and unearthly) synths, deformed samples and mangled drum beats coalesce with and ensemble of zithers, flutes, organs and guitars. 

Orbury Common’s shift in sound is most notably emphasised by the introduction of the pair’s vocals, placed at the heart of arrangements; bringing a new, animate and intimate life to their dreamscape. The songs’ subject matters stretch from chrome-coated medieval fables through to depraved landscapes and even to technologically ill-fated romance. There are moments of light, darkness, grandeur and tenderness, tethered together by an iridescent thread of yearning for something, someone or someplace.

The Sylvan Chute artwork was created by Evelyn Tan. The album will be released digitally and on 12” candy blush vinyl on 7th June via PRAH Recordings.