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Artist News Releases
XL to release ‘spartan’ Gil Scott-Heron LP
By Aly Barchi | Published on Wednesday 2 April 2014
XL Recordings will on 19 Apr, which happens to be Record Store Day, release a limited edition, vinyl-only LP by the late Gil Scott-Heron, titled ‘Nothing New’.
Recorded at the same time, in the same sessions at NYC’s Looking Glass studios, as the final album of Scott-Heron’s life, 2008’s ‘I’m New Here’, it’ll consist of stripped-back, piano-only arrangements of songs he chose from across his repertoire, plus a series of spoken-word interludes and um… ‘informal’ asides.
Writing in its sleeve notes, the album’s producer, XL Recordings’ Richard Russell, who was drawn back to the acoustic takes on listening to Scott-Heron’s whole oeuvre following his death in 2011, introduces the covers on ‘Nothing New’ as sounding “completely different to the originals, and full of magic in their simplicity”.
Russell adds: “In our early letters, Gil had picked up on my use of the word ‘spartan’ to describe how our record could be. ‘Nothing New’ is truly spartan in that it is utterly sparse and devoid of anything that is not completely necessary. All it contains is Gil’s singing and piano playing”.
Find details on the release, which will be limited to only 3000 pressings, at this link, and from it hear ‘Alien (Hold On To Your Dreams)’, originally from Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s ‘1980’ LP, plus a couple of interludes titled ‘Enjoy Yourself’ and ‘The On/Off Switch’:
