A Beginners Mind

Description

July 7, 2021Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine will release a collaborative album, A Beginners Mind, September 24 on Asthmatic Kitty Records. Two songs from the album, Reach Out and Olympus, debut today along with a video for Reach Out shot earlier this year by Sufjan and Angelo on VHS-C cameras from their respective coasts, New York and California, starring their beloved dogs Joku (a Jindo) and Charlie (a Havanese) and edited by Jess Calleiro. Listen and watch here and pre-order/pre-save the album here.

A Beginners Mind began when the two musicians and Asthmatic Kitty labelmates decamped to a friends cabin in upstate New York for a monthlong songwriting sabbatical. Watching a movie to unwind after each days work, they soon found their songs reflecting the films and began investigating this connection in earnest.

The resulting album is 14 songs (loosely) based on (mostly) popular filmshighbrow, lowbrow and everything in between. They wrote in tandemone person writing a verse, the other a chorus, churning out chord progressions and lyrics willy-nilly, often finishing each others sentences in the process. Rigorous editing and rewriting ensued. The results are less a cinematic exegesis and more a rambling philosophical inquiry that allows the songs to free-associate at will. Plot-points, scene summaries, and leading characters are often displaced by esoteric interpolations that ask the bigger question: what does it mean to be human in a broken world?

Stevens and De Augustine wrote everything with a deliberate sense of shoshinthe Zen Buddhist concept for which the record is named and an idea that empowered the pair to look for and write about unlikely inspiration without preconceived notions of what a film had to say (The I-Ching and Brian Enos Oblique Strategies also served as incentives along the way). The movies became rhetorical prompts, with the songwriters letting their distinct reactions and creative instincts govern their process. The underlying objective was empathy and openness, absent of judgment: to observe with the eyes of a child.

The albums artwork comes courtesy of Ghanaian artist Daniel Anum Jasper. In Ghana during the late 80s, a novel mobile cinema culture emerged when enterprising film fans screened Hollywood blockbusters in the backs of pick-up trucks using portable generators. To advertise the movies, artists painted alternate posters inspired only by the scant information they had about each film. Sufjan and Angelo commissioned a pioneer of this formJasperto paint a series of new works for A Beginners Mind (including covers for three 7-inch singles). Information about the project was deliberately kept vague so that Mr. Jasper could work without restraint.

Pre-order special colored edition vinyl, other formats, and related merch including a 7-inch of Reach Out and Olympus at .abm-preorder

Sufjan Stevens is an artist, songwriter and composer living in New York. He has released nine widely lauded studio albums and a number of collaborations with fellow musicians, choreographers and visual artists from the New York City Ballet and the celebrated director Luca Guadagnino to his stepfather Lowell Brams and noted dancer Jalaiah Harmon.

Angelo De Augustine is an artist and songwriter living in Thousand Oaks, Californiaa suburb north of Los Angeles, where he grew up. He has released three albums including his self-released debut, Spirals of Silence (2014), and two for Asthmatic Kitty Records, Swim Inside The Moon (2017) and Tomb (2019).