Zach Condon has announced a new Beirut album, A Study of Losses, which will arrive on April 18 on his own Pompeii Records. The follow-up to 2023’s Hadsel, which spans 18 tracks, was originally commissioned by Swedish circus Kompani Giraff for an acrobatic stage show of the same name. It includes last year’s ‘Caspian Tiger’, as well as the lead single ‘Guericke’s Unicorn’, which Condon interestingly frames as a bit of an outlier on the record. Check it out below.
“Guericke’s unicorn is a supposed reconstruction of a fossil unicorn which was actually created from the bones of a bunch of different animals like the woolly mammoth and a narwhal,” Condon explained in a statement. “It’s worth looking up the image. I’ve always been fascinated by these kinds of bizarre chapters and odd side notes of history, and I wanted to reflect the unorthodox / eccentric madness of that ‘unicorn’ in a more playful song that is somewhat disjointed from the rest of the album. I think my music can have that disjointed / chaotic tendency in general, but with the whole album otherwise being somewhat uniformly baroque inspired, ‘Guericke’s Unicorn’ really makes for an outlier on this record, having its origin in an old modular synth experiment of mine.”
Condon wrote and recorded the LP in Berlin, Germany and Stokmarknes, Norway. “When I was first approached about writing a soundtrack for a circus, a certain amount of ‘Elephant Gun’ era trauma initially came rushing up,” Condon previously shared. “I had been pigeon-holed for years as a whimsical circus waif, full of sepia-toned images of penny farthings and perhaps lion tamers with handlebar moustaches. It couldn’t have been further from how I pictured the music I was making. Ironic then, that I found Kompani Giraff’s project so enticing.”
Revisit our 2023 interview with Beirut.
A Study of Losses Cover Artwork:
A Study of Losses Tracklist:
1. Disappearances and Losses
2. Forest Encyclopedia
3. Oceanus Procellarum
4. Villa Sacchetti
5. Mare Crisium
6. Garbo’s Face
7. Mare Imbrium
8. Tuanaki Atoll
9. Mare Serenitatis
10. Guericke’s Unicorn
11. Mare Humorum
12. Sappho’s Poems
13. Ghost Train
14. Caspian Tiger
15. Mani’s 7 Books
16. Moon Voyager
17. Mare Nectaris
18. Mare Tranquillitatis
