Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll and controversial poet and performance artist Murray Lachlan Young announce lockdown inspired album „The Virus Diaries“
Paul Hartnoll – one half of ground-breaking electronic dance music duo Orbital – and controversial poet and performance artist Murray Lachlan Young announce their lockdown-inspired musical collusion album as “Hartnoll & Young”.
Capturing the covid zeitgeist, “The Virus Diaries” is exactly that; a surreal and poignantly lighthearted wander, through the ever-shifting scene of the first lockdown. The 15- Track album, impossible to genre tag, brings gleeful light to an otherwise dark scene and the result of a briskly intuitive workflow between the close pair.
The new single out today “I Need a Haircut” is released in sync as a soundtrack to the nation’s barbers and salons throwing open their doors once again to an army of dodgy DIY trims and shaved heads.
Harping back to The Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, Flanders and Swan, the Pythons with a touch of Zen Buddhism thrown in as a setting agent “The Virus Diaries” is a time capsule for the early Covid era.. The pair noting, “We hope, for a while at least, it might help provide a bit of light hearted perspective on this deeply peculiar turn of events”
“It was glaringly obvious to anyone, the last thing anyone needed was serious art. It doesn’t patronise, prescribe or instruct. It just tries to tell it like it was at the time.
The thing that went missing in lockdown #1 was fun and any sort of laughs. Everyone shut up shop and that is where we stepped into the void.“ Murray Young
The first fruits of their extraordinarily prescient collaboration initially dropped last year with the neo-apocalyptic song – “I’m Going Shopping” released as a NHS Charities Together charity single. – The techno laden track was arguably the most pertinent and apposite piece of music to hit any retail store since the Brooks Brothers kicked off that collaborative experience in the USA in 1818 however just the kind of perfectly-realised slice of lockdown insight and pop supremacy that the world was waiting for.
“This album will improve with age, you may not want to be reminded of the whole coronavirus world we now inhabit at the moment. But I suspect, in time, these observations will be the memory jog of the things that history will leave behind and you will be left asking “what the fuck happened there?” Paul Hartnoll
Tracklisting
1. Intro
2. Working From Home
3. Baking & Jogging
4. I’m Meditating
5. I’m Going Shopping
6. Smile
7. Bedtime Again
8. Coffeeshop Coffee
9. I’ve got a Delivery Coming
10. Garden Centre (Push The Trolly)
11. Homeschooling
12. I Need A Haircut
13. I’ve Been a Little Bit Up and Down
14. Are We Nearly There Yet
15. Secret Hairdresser
Hartnoll & Young – “The Virus Diaries” is released 25th June.
Editors Notes:
Hartnoll and Young first met when they attended the infamous Wilderness Secondary Modern School in Sevenoaks, Kent. After leaving school in the mid-1980s, they independently became part of a local band scene – and video arcade basement community – that only ever spawned one four-track recording. The track never saw the light of day but many years later, just as the Covid-19 enforced lockdown kicked in, serendipity ensued when the pair got back in touch and found solace in a musical and lyrical collaboration that has naturally turned into an album – a Virus diary, if you will – that charts the lockdown.
