Pêtr Aleksänder is the project which includes London based musicians Eliot James and Tom Hobden. Their music features an expansive, cinematic, richly textured sound filled with strings, delicate electronic lines, and the creaky, muted piano. Following the 2019 release of their debut album Closer, Still, they have announced the release of a new album called Collage which will be out on September 17th via Moderna Records.
Today we have the pleasure to share a new track called “Cortège for Clouds“. They explain: “Cortège for clouds is a delicate solo piano piece that brings to mind a funerary procession. Clouds are fleeting, the storm always passes. The piece is led by a melody, the recurrence of which is perhaps a reflection of our life journey, tinged with cycles of melancholy and hope, but nonetheless marked by that most bittersweet of ironies – brevity. The clouds, from their vantage above us see the same stories unfold below them. Theirs is an eternal procession — are they the mourners to our own unwitting lives?”
Listen below.
About the album, they add: “We wrote collage in late 2020 over the course of an intensive month together in the studio. When we made our first album ‘Closer, Still’ we were still experimenting with what it is that Pêtr Aleksänder is supposed to be, whereas on this one it felt like a very informed process. We’d established our sound over the course of our previous output so it was a case of working within the boundaries of what we had already created and running with it. Each of us sat down at a piano each morning, either together or individually, and wrote to whatever mood or emotion we had brewing that morning. That’s the wonderful thing about writing instrumental music, you can reflect a mood, and tell a story without saying a word which can actually sometimes be more intimate and eloquent. So, in a way each piece tells its own story without words, and the resulting body of work felt like a collection or ‘Collage’ of different moods, emotions, or stories, hence the name. For us the album tells its own little stories, catalysed by our own experiences whilst writing, and we invite the listener to attach their own narrative to the music, either as individual pieces or as a whole.“