David August Announces New Album

Jason Reyes
12th Jul 2018

Hamburg-born Italian multi-instrumentalist David August has shared news of his upcoming album D’Angelo, his first for [PIAS] Recordings, which set for an October 5 release via Inertia Music.

Recording the deeply introspective record in Palestrina, a quiet Italian city of just over 20,000 where his mother was born, D’Angelo is the sound of a young electronic artist getting in touch with his roots, exploring new landscapes and freeing inhibitions; deconstructing pop atmospheres while in search of his past, and reforming them into something deeply moving.

Drawing inspiration from the life and works of the baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the album fuses laidback pop sensibility with moody cinematographic soundscapes. David paints a vivid portrait of his past, applying his technical training to something utterly raw and primal. The results, like his career in microcosm, cannot be pigeonholed into a specific genre. There are elements of Balearic pop, noir jazz and post-rock wound up into something excruciatingly personal.

It was important in his journey towards self-discovery that August recorded the 7-track album on Italian soil. He isolated himself in the studio for a fortnight and created an indescribably, yet simply beautiful record by having Caravaggio's paintings in one monitor, and Ableton in the other.

Accompanying the announcement of D’Angelo is the the title track - the lead single for the album. It is a full and rich composition, driving and head-nod-inducing at first, with chiming guitars, rhythmic bass, and filtered vocals – direct and earnest – all playing off each other until it transforms into a thunderous ambient soundscape. Voices decay into reverb, words become glossolalia, muttering, breathing, whimpering. The sudden tension broken by an electric piano groove coming in, and the drums briefly returning to the front before fading again into crackle, with everything seamlessly merging into an unsettling drone like something out of Forbidden Planet, leading into an unknown landscape stretching out around the listener.

You can preorder D’Angelo here or listen to his lead single of the same name right here.