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Petrels is the solo project of Somerset UK musician and artist, Oliver Barrett. He’s just announced two new albums, some 7 years after his previous album, 2019’s The Dusk Loom. The first of these releases, Infangthief, was originally written and recorded in 2022, before being reworked in light of the subsequent album, Outfangthief, which is due to be released later this year.
The two albums are inextricably linked, and as you can hear from ‘Fishes’, the piece above, Barrett crafts an incredibly powerful and immersive sonic world that merges sound design, electronica and vocals in a highly distinctive and satisfying way.
This is what they have to say about it:
“Taking their titles from Old English legal terms („thief seized without“ and „thief seized within”), the central thread running through both albums is the illusion of assumed human authority – that which is given and that which is taken by force. With Western society seemingly hellbent on willingly embracing a brutally destructive economic model (even in its death throes), these albums attempt – in their own small way – to undertake the essential task of imagining alternative ways of being.”
Infangthief will be released via Denovali on the 16th of October 26. You can find it here.
