ABOUT THIS ALBUM:
Released on April 7th, 2023, "In The Hours Left Until Dawn" is Bipolar Explorer's 11th album. Advance airplay for the new album found it appearing in The Heavily Played Records charts of both New York's WFMU and California's KFJC, as well extensive previews on London's Resonance FM.
A double-album - 22 tracks over two discs and two hours - it weaves together strands of the experimental, the ambient, spoken word, field recordings sprinkled with instrumentation and shoegaze-y compositions in a kind of eclectic, deep-listening dreamscape.
"In The Hours" follows in the mold of two of the band’s most recent albums - 2020’s "Deux Anges" (another double-album) and 2021’s "Forests, Voices, Coastlines, Dreams: Recordings for The Dark Outside". While the latter (as its title may suggest), a collection of the band’s compositions for the UK’s storied experimental radio project, focused exclusively on the group’s more avant garde work and the former a more eclectic cross-genre endeavor, both mark the group’s affection for radio and their aim to create long-form soundscapes that evoke what the UK’s Norman Records has described as akin to “a distant late night radio transmission drifting to us as we lay half asleep in bed.”
A Note of Thanks:
Dear friends, it’s been quite a ride since we brought you "Deux Anges" in late 2020. Like many of you, the pandemic kept us from being with our friends and loved ones, and even one another, until 2022 arrived. We’re grateful that we were able to resume work and actually be in the same rooms - both here and in France - together, to write and record this album. We’re so grateful to all of you for your interest, for listening. And while we, also like you, miss those we’ve lost, achingly, we keep them in our hearts always - it’s really the animating principle of Bipolar Explorer, itself, our reason and compass. As you listen, perhaps falling into dreams, we hope these two hours of music and sounds will bring you safely through the night, to the other side. While lingering in dreams, may your own angels visit, whispering words of comfort and love. And may the memory of them, so doing, buoy you up upon waking and throughout all your days.
With thanks, love & faith,
Bipolar Explorer
New York City
April 2023
Credits
Summer Serafin - vocals, spoken word.
Michael Serafin-Wells - vocals, guitars, bowed guitar, bass, synth, organ, melodica, chimes, tape loops, percussion, spoken word.
Sylvia Solanas - spoken word, backing vocals.
All songs, music, lyrics and spoken word narrative poems by Michael Serafin-Wells. c. 2023 Thirteen November Music (ASCAP).
Recorded live, noisily and in a hurry at The Shrine - NYC.
Field recordings on location - New York, California, France, Northern Atlantic Coast.
Produced and mixed by Bipolar Explorer.
Mastered by Scott Craggs, Old Colony - Boston.
Graphics and booklet by Sylvia Solanas.
Layout by Audun Grimstad.
Cover image: “Night and Her Daughter Sleep” by Mary L. Macomber (1902, public domain).
c/p 2023 Bipolar Explorer, Slugg Records and Thirteen November Music (ASCAP)
All rights reserved.
