Lost Map in collaboration with Chicago-based avant-jazz label International Anthem and the Total Refreshment Centre in London is proud to announce the forthcoming new album by Manchester-born, London-based bandleader, composer, saxophonist, activist and orator Angus Fairbairn, AKA Alabaster dePlume. To Cy & Lee Instrumentals Vol. 1 will be released on 12” vinyl and via digital services on February 28, 2020. The follow-up to Alabaster’s critically-acclaimed 2018 album The Corner of a Sphere, it draws together 11 different instrumental tracks, some old and some brand new, recorded over eight years in cities around the UK together with a coterie of collaborators, including Dan ‘Danalogue’ Leavers of The Comet Is Coming and Sarathy Korwar. A gently uplifting celebration of connectedness, community and that special way in which music can break down barriers, transcend language and empower expressions of the otherwise inexpressible, it’s a record drenched in pure, righteous humanity.

To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 is titled in tribute to Cy Lewis and Lee ‘Shredder’ Bowman, whom Alabaster met while working for Ordinary Lives, a charity in Manchester which supports people with disabilities to live in their own homes and enjoy fulfilling lives. As an exercise in helping the two men learn to socialise better, Alabaster would devise and sing improvised vocal melodies with them, recording their impromptu sessions on his phone. He later began to use these scratch improvisations as templates for fully-realised recordings.

“The music of To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 contains naturally elegant orchestration wrapped around something visceral and primordial,” writes journalist and critic Emma Warren, author of the book Make Some Space: Tuning Into Total Refreshment Centre, in an evocative new bio of Alabaster dePlume enclosed with this press release (link below). “Swirled inside the 11 pieces are shades of Japanese Min’yo folk, the Ethio-jazz of saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya and hints of the pan-human ‘ancient music’ that sat underneath Arthur Russell’s melodies on ‘First Thought, Best Thought’. The music is filled with space, inspired, he says, by computer games and Japanese animation, particularly Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack for Studio Ghibli’s ‘Castle In The Sky’.”

“These tunes were not composed in response to the lives of my friends Cy and Lee, they are products of the times we had, while supporting each other through difficulties, and learning from one-another, about courage, people, and life. They’re an impression of what we found was needed, to exist, and a celebration of communication that’s free from the demands of words.”