Alex Henry Foster Shares Second Single 'Sorrowful Bouquet' Ahead of New LP 'A Measure Of Shape And Sounds'
Ahead of releasing his new ambient LP, A Measure Of Shape And Sounds on September 20, Alex Henry Foster shares a second single and music video for the track Sorrowful Bouquet and explains:
"As much as the nature of “A Measure of Shape and Sounds” has been inspired by a profound introspection about life’s impermanence and the decaying sensations that accompany the defying acceptance of our own existential consciousness, “Sorrowful Bouquet” evokes serenity and peacefulness, the results of losing our illusionary control over the conceptual power of time and over our physical limitations and tangible perspectives, thus offering the possibility to embrace emotional freedom that comes with the emancipative reflection of who we are; a transient fragment of the sound waves we’ve created through the limitations of our own selves."
While touring across Europe for 10 weeks on his Ascending in Bright Lights summer tour, Foster also caught up with KEXP's NPR Network podcast, A Deeper Listen to talk about his multiple Billboard-charting album, Kimiyo, the first chapter of Voyage à la Mer, that includes a motion picture film produced by Foster due in spring 2025 according to an interview with Le Soleil, one of the most notable provincial newspapers.
What would eventually become the second chapter of Voyage à la Mer, A Measure of Shape and Sounds is an intimate journey of its own, representing a profound personal breathe-in made of several layers of guitar loops, reverberations, resonances, and oscillations juxtaposed together to create a sonic multi-directional contemplative maelstrom. Purposely recorded live to capture as direct a flow as possible, the songs embodied at that exact moment carried their human disposition not only to abandon oneself to the motion but to become one with it. Foster mentioned: “It felt like the representation of an organic movement that could ultimately break us free from the echo chamber we might have been trapped in and therefore end the emotional twirl and affective cycle of redundancy that too often comes with our emptiness and desperation.”
He adds: “Even though I had the conviction that we had guided Kimiyo as far as we had to without spoiling its natural beam of light by suddenly adding the shadows of our ambitions to it all, Ben and I felt there was more to explore, as so many additional fragments of musical landscapes instinctively surfaced while we kept dwelling on the vivid sensations we were both still being impacted with at that precise instant.”
Instrumental by choice and minimalist by design, it was capital for Foster that A Measure of Shape and Sounds stood as its own living organism, not as a faire-valoir or add-on to the growing entity that Voyage à la Mer was becoming. If Momoka incarnated Kimiyo’s voice, Foster was adamant about the fact that “no introspection is really yours until you voice it yourself.” In that sense, the album would provide an ongoing soundtrack to that internal self-searching reflection inviting us to lift ourselves forward, to tame the other bonding voices to which we usually surrender our longing desires for freedom.
