The Range, the moniker of producer James Hinton, has announced his first album in six years, Mercury. The follow-up to 2016’s Potential arrives on June 10 via Domino and includes a new single called ‘Ricercar’, which you can check out below.
“A Ricercar in a musical context is a prelude fugue that kind of sets the tableau of a piece to follow,” Hinton explained in a press release. “I first heard about the concept of a Ricercar in a biography of Bach, who famously encoded his own name in a piece (H having been interchangeable as the name for B-flat at the time). At the time I wrote this song I was listening to a lot of rap from the 90s, specifically DJ Premier beats. As such I was rapidly collecting breaks and had just stumbled upon the Chief Kamanawanalea break by the Turtles and found that if I reordered the sections I could make this kind of palindromic composite break that seemed to propel the song along.”
He added: “This song features a vocal sample from Instagram of a singer covering Tamar Braxton’s ‘My Man.’ The lyrics are quite personal to me and are a good example of what I try to do in a lot of my songs. I tend to try to find a way to say something that I would never be able to say out loud. I think of my editing of lyrics as a pressure release.”
Mercury Cover Artwork:
Mercury Tracklist:
1. Bicameral
2. 1995
3. Urethane
4. Ricercar
5. Nor For Me
6. Relegate
7. A Tree Day
8. Balm
9. Cantor
10. Every Good Thing
11. Violet
