Amanda Palmer & Edward Ka-Spel Collaboration
Amanda Palmer & Edward Ka-Spel have released their first full-length collaboration album, I Can Spin A Rainbow.
The video for album track The Clock at the Back of the Cage premiered on The Skinny. This stop-motion video, which uses a vast assortment of objects and live physical theatre actors, was produced in a large warehouse in Melbourne and conceived by Palmer and the directors: Melbourne locals Christy Louise Flaws, Chris Bennett and Luke O’Connor.
The Clock At The Back of The Cage video, along with Palmer & Ka-Spel’s I Can Spin A Rainbow project was powered by Patreon, the platform Amanda uses to enable her fans to fund and support her in the creation of new songs/ webcasts/ videos/ writing/ performance-art and more.
To explore behind the scenes info on her collaboration with Edward Ka-Spel please visit here.
I Can Spin A Rainbow is the fulfilment of a lifelong dream for Palmer, an avowed fan of Ka-Spel and his band the Legendary Pink Dots since discovering their psycho-theatrical, multi-textural work in her teens. As noted in her best-selling 2014 memoir, The Art of Asking, the LPD have long been an inspiration to Palmer, their deeply connected relationship with fans as important to her life and work as their fearless autonomy and impossible-to-pigeonhole musical approach.
Recorded largely on Ka-Spel’s computer, I Can Spin A Rainbow is a truly collaborative effort, “A spiritual experience,” says Palmer, in which both artists’ stories, song fragments, poems, and lyrics became wholly meshed with loops, melancholy piano playing, melodic beds, and strange rhythms.
The results range from the enchantingly minimal The Clock at the Back of the Cage and the album-opening Pulp Fiction mysterious and strange with a luxurious theatricality that conjures both of its creators’ prior oeuvres while also opening a curtain into a heretofore unheard shared sonic world.
“We merged our songwriting heads and poetic worlds to make a new universe,” Palmer says. “We would sit in Imogen Heap’s house (where the album was recorded) drinking cups of tea, bemoaning the state of the upcoming election, binge drinking in the UK, the refugee crisis, our internet addictions, frightening news we had read, our relationships… and then we’d compost all of the ingredients of our fears and conversations into song form. The Rainbow metaphor – which is also a nod to the ‘spinning beach ball of death’ on a Mac – was a wide-open image that kept popping up as a recurring theme on the record. It’s both dark and light at the same time. To me, the songs are simultaneously frightening and comforting, like a thunderstorm heard from a living room.”
“Making this record with Amanda felt a little like discovering a twin you didn’t know you had,” says Ka-Spel, “until a mysterious email lands in your inbox at a particularly auspicious moment. Some things are just meant to be…”
I Can Spin A Rainbow track listing:
01. Pulp Fiction
02. Shahla’s Missing Page
03. The Shock of Kontakt
04. Beyond The Beach
05. The Clock at the Back of the Cage
06. The Changing Room
07. The Jack of Hands
08. Prithee/Liquidation Day
09. Rainbow’s End
10. Subway (Vinyl only bonus track)
11. The Sun Still Shines (Vinyl only bonus track)
