Cate Le Bon: Pompeii
Soundcheck, Live
Originally Aired: Tuesday, February 8, 2022
Autosave-File vom d-lab2/3 der AgfaPhoto GmbH
H. Hawkline
Overview
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The multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer, Cate Le Bon, offers new music from her latest album, Pompeii, composed in the “uninterrupted vacuum,” of the current times – global pandemic plus climate emergency’s colliding eco-traumas. Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) on hazy, opulent, and sometimes sonically minimal songs, which are of the moment, playful, satirical, and surreal. Unhinged opulence rests in sonic deconstruction that finds coherence in pop structures when Cate Le Bon performs.
This event is produced with Soundcheck and hosted by John Schaefer of New Sounds. Genre-neutral and open-eared, Soundcheck is the podcast where artists perform and talk about their work, their process, and themselves.
Credit: Photo by H. Hawkline
The past few years have seen Cate Le Bon emerge as a much lauded and sought-after collaborator, producing albums for contemporaries such as Deerhunter (Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?), John Grant (Boy From Michigan), and forthcoming albums from both Devendra Banhart and H. Hawkline. She’s not so much a gun for hire as a multi-faceted artist and producer who can both steer the ship and tap into a collective mindset; in 2019, she joined John Cale for a three-night live stretch in Paris, and 2021 will see a bass appearance on the track “If I Don’t Hear from You Tonight” from Courtney Barnett’s Things Take Time, Take Time. As Bradford Cox aptly notes about Le Bon, “there are artists who look inwards or outwards, and then there are the very rare ones who transcend either location.”
