BY: JOEY REAMS
Indie-folk artists Angelo De Augustine and Sufjan Stevens are teaming up for a new collaborative album called A Beginner’s Mind, due Sept. 24 via Asthmatic Kitty. The two worked on the album at a cabin in upstate New York while watching movies every day, becoming the inspiration for the album. On top of the announcement, the duo also released two songs, “Olympus” and “Reach Out,” with the latter being released with a music video. Finally, Ghanian artist Daniel Anum Jasper made the cover artwork seen above. You can watch the videos and see the album tracklist below.
“Watching a movie to unwind after each day’s work, they soon found their songs reflecting the films and began investigating this connection in earnest,” a press release explains about the album, which is said to be “(loosely) based on (mostly) popular films—highbrow, lowbrow and everything in between.”
“The results are less a ‘cinematic exegesis’ and more a ‘rambling philosophical inquiry’ that allows the songs to free-associate at will,” the release adds. “Plot-points, scene summaries, and leading characters are often displaced by esoteric interpolations that ask the bigger question: what does it mean to be human in a broken world?”
A Beginner’s Mind:
01 Reach Out
02 Lady Macbeth in Chains
03 Back to Oz
04 The Pillar of Souls
05 You Give Death a Bad Name
06 Beginner’s Mind
07 Olympus
08 Murder and Crime
09 (This Is) The Thing
10 It’s Your Own Body and Mind
11 Lost in the World
12 Fictional California