THE ALBUM LEAF JOIN GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR ON TOUR THIS WEEK!
September 8, 2023 BY Jason Currell
Los Angeles-based electronic artist The Album Leaf will join esteemed Canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor on tour this week starting Sunday, September 10th, in Worchester, MA, at The Palladium. The tour includes stops in Portsmouth, NH, Atlantic City, NJ, and Columbus, OH, before wrapping in Lexington, KY, at The Burl on September 15th. Following the U.S. dates, The Album Leaf will head to Asia for eight dates, starting in China on October 10th with stops in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan, including Asagiri Jam Festival on October 21st. A full list of dates is below.
Tomorrow, The Album Leaf will share a remix by Los Angeles composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith of his recent track, “Prologue,” off his 2023 album, FUTURE FALLING. When asked about the remix, he notes, “I am deeply humbled by the opportunity to collaborate with such an exceptional artist who beautifully reimagined ‘Prologue,’ one of my favorite tracks from ‘Future Falling.’ Her transformative touch has elevated the song to a mesmerizing trance, infusing it with her distinct vocal prowess, bringing a fresh and captivating essence to the music and revitalizing it in a truly remarkable way.” Future Falling was his first original body of work, not including his numerous notable film scores and re-issues, since his acclaimed 2016 album Between Waves and featured notable indie artists Kimbra and Bat For Lashes.
THE ALBUM LEAF ASIAN TOUR:
CHINA –
10-10 Beijing | JiangJinJiu
10-11 Shanghai | VAS
10-13 Shenzhen | HOULIVE
10-14 Guangzhou | YunzhuJuChang
TAIWAN –
10-15 Taipei | THE WALL
HONG KONG –
10-18 Hong Kong | KITEC Music Zone
JAPAN –
10-20 Tokyo | WWWX
10-21 Asagiri | Asagiri Jam
ABOUT FUTURE FALLING and THE ALBUM LEAF:
For the past seven years, the prolific Jimmy LaValle put his primary focus on the tight deadlines that came with scoring films and collaborations with apps like Calm, allowing the loose concept of the “next record” to stretch on with over two hundred demos written and dozens of album ideas before the ten final tracks that comprise, FUTURE FALLING, finally stood out to him. A fluid, cohesive, and definitive set, the record exhibits LaValle as emblematically inquisitive and renewed by outside perspectives.
A desire for innovation, and the necessity of the pandemic, forced many of the collaborations to be done remotely, making LaValle the arranger of layers from all over: drums, synths, horns, violins, voice, and more. Without the in-the-room dynamics, he had more time to experiment, adding and subtracting ad infinitum with LaValle’s signature Rhodes taking a back seat to the synths, effects pedals, and other analog-sourced electronics. With various machines, including the Novation Peak and Moog DFAM, as his engine, LaValle routes the sounds in and out, re-sampling and manipulating drums and tones to achieve the shapes his mind’s eye was seeing. “There’s a lot more exploration, out of the box; I’ve found a really good balance in creating music organically and analog, utilizing digital tools to tweak the source further.” The result, mixed by Joshua Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv), is a masterful exercise in pacing; the music meanders, pulses, and arcs in a way that arrests attention.
The Album Leaf has been steadily making his mark as a soft-spoken innovator since 1999. Now based in LA, Jimmy LaValle started out in the San Diego music scene creating vivid, rhythmic, soaring instrumentals centered around the Rhodes piano. With over two decades of acclaimed releases (for Sub Pop, City Slang, and others), countless film scores, and numerous collaborations with artists and brands, he has become a touchstone for the next generation’s wave of melodic and meditative electro-organic music.
