SPILL ALBUM PREMIERE: NICK HUDSON – KANDA TEENAGE HONEY

NICK HUDSON – KANDA TEENAGE HONEY

A SPILL EXCLUSIVE ALBUM PREMIERE

Today we have the pleasure of presenting the new album from UK artist Nick Hudson, who hails from Eastern England but had made Brighton his home for many years. With a drastic change of scenery, Hudson has been based out of Tbilisi for the past two years, he has found Georgia to be a great source of inspiration. Now his home from home, his new album Kanda Teenage Honey is a work of art created in this post-Soviet atmosphere against the backdrop of war in neighbouring Ukraine.

This colossal 16-track collection follows his two 2021 releases – the Font Of Human Fractures album and K69996ROMA:EP. Perhaps best known as the frontman of The Academy of Sun, Hudson has also collaborated with such legends as Matthew Seligman (David Bowie, Tori Amos, Morrissey), Wayne Hussey (The Mission), Massive Attack’s Shara Nelson, David Tibet (Current 93) and queercore icon GB Jones.

A profound, clever and vividly confessional Avant-pop composer, Hudson is always pushing the envelope in his works, his unique musical output forged via musical territory that is hardly explored.

Recently featured in Billboard, this album was mastered to analogue tape by Paul Pascoe (Barry Adamson, Beat Hotel, Sleaford Mods) at Church Road Studios in Hove. It is no wonder that much of the album has a vibe of hauntings past, given that most of the tracks were recorded in a former Soviet movie studio – more specifically, with Ilya Lukashev at Leno Studio and Sano Studio in Tbilisi.

Apart from a community of Georgian musicians, the album also features numerous celebrated artists – such as Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite, Toby Driver of Kayo Dot, Stuart Dahlquist (Asva, Burning Witch, Sunn O))), Lizzy Carey (Bat For Lashes), Robert Wyatt collaborator Alfreda Benge, Christopher Nell (legendary German performer and collaborator of US theatre visionary Robert Wilson), and 14-year-old soprano prodigy Poppy Efemey.

“Russia attempted to invade Georgia most recently in 2008 and we’ve seen a vast influx of Russians fleeing the conflict and resettling in Tbilisi (which endures and suffers a pro-Russian government ideologically in conflict with most of its citizens). This geopolitical tension has inevitably made its way into the lyrical and musical texture of the record via the songs ‘Hollow Man’ and ‘Sky Burial While Alive’. It also contains oligarch-hexing magic realism and a tribute to that vastly-neglected demographic – the old-school homosexual. Musically it encompasses art rock, black metal, ambient music, agitprop folk, charred goth rock, symphonic vastness and piano ballads -all infused with the energies and landscape of Georgia,” says Nick Hudson.

“As an album, Kanda Teenage Honey explores ideas of preserving the sacred from the corrosively kleptocratic institutions of church and state: spiritual and material kleptocracy.  The title itself refers to a very real preservation of innocence derived from a story I heard of a local villager whose teenage son was shot and killed: the father had his son’s body preserved in honey. As such, there are secular hymns for peace and lucid stillness, tales of saints de-martyring themselves and falling in love free of judgement from anachronistic scrutiny – a thinly veiled parable of queer love.  Two very close friends died within six months of each other during my first year in Georgia – there are requiems in the ‘Archipelago’ and ‘Bardo’, plus an acappella tribute to the Siberian husky that helped me grieve them during a retreat to the sublime mountainous region of ‘Khevsureti’ by the Chechen border, where despite being an ostensibly Orthodox country, pagan traditions are still passionately observed.  I dreamed eighty-percent of ‘Bardo’ in the energised serenity of this beautiful region while mourning my friend Jesse. Patrick, honoured in ‘Archipelago’, was one of my earliest mentors and a dynamically brilliant pianist.  They are much missed,” explains Nick Hudson.

“‘Ortolan’ references the summer of 2021, when I fled to the same Isle Of Wight monastery at which Scott Walker had sought refuge in the sixties, as my mental and physical health hit a nadir and I was forced to leave the city I’d called home for twenty years. ‘This Heat’ refers to a return journey from a plague necropolis at the Chechen border, where giddily drunken park rangers piloting a 4X4 hurtled us passengers down a treacherous mountain pass and I briefly thought it might be the last song I’d ever write.  Since then, I’ve come to learn that Georgians are some of the virtuosic drivers in the world, even drunk, and I need not have feared.”

Kanda Teenage Honey will be available via Bandcamp and everywhere else digitally. On March 16, Hudson celebrates with an album launch concert in Tbilisi, Georgia, which will be livestreamed for those who cannot be there in person.

CREDITS

Composed, arranged and produced by Nick Hudson
Engineered by Ilya Lukashev & Nick Hudson at Leno and Sano Studios, Tbilisi
Steinway recorded by Ilya Lukashev & George Gvarjaladze at Leno Studios, Tbilisi
Mixed by Toby Driver
Mastered to analogue tape by Paul Pascoe, Church Road Studios, Hove
Nick Hudson – piano. acoustic guitar on 2, Faemi 1M, programming, vocals, foley, protest field recordings
Beqa Minadze – electric guitars
Gigi Koberidze – drums
Greg Massi – guitar on 4
Lizzy Carey – all strings
Toby Driver – hammered dulcimer on 10
Poppy Efemey – soprano on 10
Stuart Dahlquist – bass on 13
Samuel Gottlebe – classical guitar on 10, 12 and 15
Kianna Blue – Issa G Thang on 13
Alfreda Benge – cosmological rhetoric on 3
Oliver Hill – guitar on 8
Christopher Nell – duet vocal on 12
Stuart Braithwaite – black metal Ivor Cutler on 8
Vsevolod Osupov – poem and recitation on 11
Oli Spleen, Kianna Blue and Jon Griffin – choir on 9
Ana-STASI-a – thelemic seduction on 14
Wolfgang Dubieniec – mood on 3
Videos directed, filmed and edited by Nick Hudson
‘For My Silence’ artwork by Kenneth Anger
‘Khevsureti’ cover painting by Berdia Arabuli
Album artwork by Nick Hudson and Gary Mallard
Artist photography by @_Carl_Solomon_
Rings featured in photos by @Fauda.Silver

A true purveyor of the arts, here are the two videos Hudson released to herald the new album:

Nick Hudson
Kanda Teenage Honey
(Independent)
Release Date: March 15, 2024

Artist Links

Background Photo Credit: Carl Solomon | Rings By Fauda Silver