Simon Armitage Has a New Ambient Post-Rock Band

Alison Flood lets readers of The Guardian know about Simon Armitage's new ambient post-rock band, LYR, writing that "[m]ost modern poets laureate have released recordings of their work, but none hitherto has put out an album billed as providing 'ambient post-rock passages, jazz flourishes and atonal experimentalism'. But that’s the latest direction for the current incumbent, Simon Armitage." More: 

Armitage and his band LYR, which includes musician Richard Walters and producer and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Pearson, have signed to “post-classical” label Mercury KX, with their first single, Never Good With Horses, out on Friday, and their debut album Call in the Crash Team to follow in the spring.

“We’re lining up some shows as well,” said Armitage. “Or as they call them in this business, gigs.” LYR will be appearing on 9 March in Leeds, and 10 March in London.

Armitage said the songs on the first album started as “sort-of poems, hybrid things between songs and lyrics and poems”.

“I quite often read them at events, but I think they were reaching out for tunes and musical setting,” he said. “This allows me to indulge an aspect of lyricism which is generally not available on the printed page.”

Continue reading at The Guardian.