Charlie Ivan / Of Nothing + Where The Dogs Go To Die LP Bundle ***PRE-ORDER***
Charlie Ivan 'Of Nothing' + 'Where The Dogs Go To Die' LP Bundle
Of Nothing
Alice Springs-based songwriter Charlie Ivan releases his new album Of Nothing.
Of Nothing began taking shape while Ivan was living in Warburton Community on the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in Western Australia. Having grown up playing piano but primarily writing on guitar, Ivan found himself returning to the instrument during long stretches of solitude in the Western Desert. Ivan explains, "I bought a piano when I moved out there and started writing on it, which was something I'd not really ever done before."
A deep connection to place remains central to the album's identity. Rather than recording elsewhere, Ivan chose to make the record on Arrernte Country, where many of the songs were written and where their emotional landscape felt most at home. "The songs I've been doing for some time now always feel really grounded in the desert country. We organised a show the night before recording at the local tin shed theatre on the banks of the dry river bed that runs through town, The Totem Theatre. This way we had the pressure of getting the songs together in front of people."
Musically, Of Nothing sits somewhere between alternative rock and desert-folk. The album carries the influence of songwriters such as Mark Lanegan, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen and Sharon Van Etten, while remaining grounded in the desert country and the remote landscape on which it was written.
"It's meant to feel like a car dropping into the low road, trying to escape a dust storm trailing in from the west. It's meant to drive forward with a kind of quiet intensity. Some soft moments of longing and memory. A feeling that everything could collapse."
At its core, Of Nothing is an album concerned with beauty found inside bleakness. Throughout the record, Ivan returns to recurring themes of longing, love, desperation and the strange futility that shadows everyday existence. It also represents a continuation of a lifelong relationship with songwriting. Ivan credits his mother, who is a songwriter herself, with introducing him to guitar and piano, and the music of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Sinéad O'Connor, Radiohead and Nick Cave, at an early age.
Where The Dogs Go To Die
Where the Dogs Go to Die is the haunting debut album from Charlie Ivan Band, written between the remote desert and the city and recorded on Arrernte Country in Mparntwe/Alice Springs.
Drawing inspiration from artists like Nick Cave, Nils Frahm and Bill Evans, this richly layered, piano-driven record conjures landscape and feeling. Its dark, lyrical themes resonate with the bleak beauty and quiet intensity found in Cormac McCarthy’s prose.
Where the Dogs Go to Die was recorded over the course of a week in a Mparntwe sharehouse-turned-music-studio by Naarm-based composer, engineer and producer Dylan Young. There’s a hefty credit list for the record, including a 10-person choir of friends who gathered on Wednesday nights to eat potato soup and come up with harmonies.