Kyle from He Was Eaten By Owls is not one to shy away from an ambitious project. Take, for instance, the band’s extravagant 2016 concept album Chorus 30 From Blues For The Hitchhiking Dead, an avant-garde chamber music experience featuring no less than 16 instruments delivered by a crew of 15 musicians. Kyle went a step further, offering punters a combined audio-visual multimedia experience with the whole project. You’d be gagged for saying HWEBO isn’t a denser-than-dense and pithier-than-pithy conceptual piece of art.
This is what Kyle and HWEBO do, they attempt to wander beyond musical frontiers and tie-lines. They go foraging for new sonic treats, replete with a heavy artillery of musical tools. It is experimental music awash with polyrhythms, counterpoint, improvisation and meter-hopping.
And here HWEBO emerge again, in an attempt to outdo their preceding works. Inchoate With The Light Go I is the second instalment of an ambitious three-part epic (Chorus 30 being the first), and has already been the subject of a 25 minute behind-the-scenes documentary. As with its predecessor, Inchoate is deeply conceptual. Themes of grief, loss, queer theory, and feminism are narrated through a lush arsenal of new instruments, including harp, contrabass, chamber choir, and pipe organ. It is this multifarious utility of tools, constructs and concepts that maketh the HWEBO album. It’s left us thinking: where on Earth will he go next?
Inchoate With The Light Go I will be released on the 10th of November but, hey, you can just go and pre-order the record right now over the HWEBO bandcamp page. Go on, give it a crack…