Courtney Barnett has today announced the release of the instrumental album 'End Of The Day' which will be released on the 8th of September via Mom+Pop.
Comprised of 17 seamless improvisations which were originally created as part of the score to the documentary 'Anonymous Club', 'End Of The Day' is a meditative, slow-burning and beautiful record, prioritising atmosphere, tone and texture over traditional song structures and melodic hooks. It's a fearless and stunning turn for an artist who built her formidable reputation through profound lyricism and riff-based fireworks.
As a taste of the album to come, Barnett today also releases the first three tracks of the album. "Start Somewhere", "Life Balance" and "First Slow" are available on all streaming services alongside a visual accompaniment directed by film-maker Claire Vogel.
The album will be released worldwide by Milk! Records in conjunction with Mom+Pop. It will in fact be the final record released on Barnett's own Milk! Records which will be closing down at the end of 2023 after more than a decade.
In May of 2021, Courtney Barnett and collaborator/producer Stella Mozgawa had just handed in the final masters for Barnett’s third album Things Take Time, Take Time when they met up with filmmaker Danny Cohen in a Melbourne studio. Barnett had been experimenting with new gear, making meditative long-form pieces for an audience of one. Mozgawa had just bought an Oberheim OB6 which became the center-piece of her setup, feeding sounds through a tape echo. And for his part, Cohen had a near-finished documentary, Anonymous Club, a candid portrayal of the travails and hard-fought personal triumphs of Barnett’s ascent to international indie rock adulation. Now, he just needed a score.
As Cohen played the final edit of his film that day, Barnett and Mozgawa improvised with one guiding principle—nothing too maudlin, obvious, or instructive, nothing to tell the future audience how they should be feeling about Barnett’s life onscreen. Anonymous Club offers up a plethora of Barnett’s music, documenting her charged live sets and her start-and-stop-and-search songwriting process. The pieces she and Mozgawa made that day, though, float around the edges of the finished scenes, coloring the proceedings much like the grain of Cohen’s 16mm film. Really, one could watch Anonymous Club and never know that Barnett made extra music for it.
A year passed and Barnett found she liked listening to what they had made in Melbourne, putting it on and existing within its reflective gaze. Might this be more than the instrumental music of a film? She began sorting through the panoply of little instrumentals like amoebic puzzle pieces, figuring out how she might adjust them ever so slightly until they fit together into a complete and compelling picture. Almost everything on the result of that work—a seamless series of 17 instrumental improvisations she now calls End of the Day —stems from the film. But this is soundtrack as sound-art collage, reordering and reframing the past to shape and share a different story about who we have been and what we might become.
