Image credit: Julia Perkuhn
Leipzig-based project Warm Graves (the moniker of electronic composer Jonas Wehner) has announced a new album, ‘Ease’, and sharing the lead single, ‘Neon’ – the first piece of new Warm Graves music in seven years. Due out February 25th 2022 via London-based label Fuzz Club, the new album is the long-awaited follow-up to Warm Graves’ 2014 debut ‘Ships Will Come’. This seven-year gestation between the two albums brings with it a transformation in the creative process of Warm Graves, much like the human body exchanges its cells every seven years – our human bodies being both the same and wholly other.
On the new album, Wehner reflects: “For me, ‘Ease’ always comes back to the idea of transformation. In this case, from struggle to ease, choirs to whispers, rush to patience. Those 7 years didn’t pass lightly. Life took a lot of turns and I had a lot to learn. It’s all in there compressed in 9 tracks.” Rooted in the pressures of modern life but still managing to find some comfort to be had, Wehner says of the album’s first single: “‘Neon’ is about dealing with expectations and pressures, and ultimately dissolving in them. It is also about the acceptance of disappointment, of being unstable as the only way to regain strength. It ends with a very peaceful thought of us all being equal in this struggle for balance.”
Where ‘Ships Will Come’ dealt in ethereal, dream-like atmospherics guided by an operatic choir, ‘Ease’ offers a collection of harsher, more experimental electronic works touching on dark ambient drone, austere coldwave and synthesised kosmische musik. The transitions in this new album are more violent than before, expressing the difficult personal and social upheavals of its composition period. The choir is now absent and Wehner’s own voice assumes a more central, hypnotic stance. The soundscapes of the first album make way for something darker and a concentration of melody into a single voice – a voice no longer collective, but embodying both isolation and intimacy.
Warm Graves was brought to life by Jonas Marc Anton Wehner in 2012. In the years following the release of their epic 2014 debut ‘Ships Will Come’, Warm Graves soon found themselves touring with the likes of Exploded View and Moon Duo and sharing stages with The Soft Moon, Crystal Stilts, Efterklang and Moonface, among many others. As well as headline tours around Europe of their own, they’ve also appeared at such international festivals as The Great Escape, ATP, Iceland Airwaves, Roskilde and Eindhoven Psych Lab. Having spent the last few years quietly working on ‘Ease’ in the shadows, Warm Graves is now emerging once again as both a live and recording force – and doing so with a new live band, new album and reissue of ‘Ships Will Come’ (also released via their new label Fuzz Club Records) in tow.
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