BA DA BING

Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, the group’s 1991 final album, took a year to make, and yet it has required decades to fully appreciate. Following up on the abstract and composerly Spirit of Eden, which sufficiently alienating pop fans of the band’s earlier material, Laughing Stock took spaces in recorded music to new extremes, with layers of silence breathing through strings, woodwinds, percussion and Mark Hollis’ delicate vocals. The record exists as one complete thought, albeit with jagged diversions and tangents. Laughing Stock will be released on October 11, 2011.

Released for the first time on vinyl in the USA.  Seven years after Talk Talk’s final record, Laughing Stock, Mark Hollis completed this self-titled album, to date the last thing he has put out. Where his previous band’s music started as hard synth pop and disintegrated into abstraction, Mark Hollis begins with silence, a full twenty seconds of room ambience.  That breaks into compositions sprinkled with woodwinds and acoustic guitars, spread delicate and cerebral like Ulysses written on parchment paper. Mark Hollis will be released on October 11, 2011.