With his new album ‘Desiderata‘ out July 15th via Joyful Noise & Backward Music, today SUUNS frontman Ben Shemie sharing new single “The Return” recorded with the Molinari String Quartet alongside a video recorded live at Theatre Lachapelle, Montreal.
Speaking about the track, Ben said “‘The Return’ is the last song and the conclusion of Desiderata. It is our hero’s return to earth, and a yearning for connection. The tightly arranged strings of the album give way to repetitive riffs of a TB303 synthesizer. The voyage into the deepest recesses of the universe reveal that the end is merely the beginning, and that the distant stars are actually inside of all of us.”
“It’s a soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist,” Shemie said of the album’s themes and structure. True to its interstellar themes, Desiderata literally fell from the stars. Its name, derived from the Latin phrase de sidere (“from the stars”) bows to the fantastical and galaxy-wide compositions that comprise this ambitious new work. Inspired by the sci-fi media like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, and the novel Neuromancer, Desiderata conjures a universe of fantastical proportions. Continuing to chew on themes of mindfulness and self-discovery with pop-spiked teeth, Shemie wrestles with orchestral flourishes and synth-powered chaos to tell the story of a world beyond conception or reach.
Channeling his classical background and tutelage under acclaimed composer Ana Sokolovic, Shemie combines string fractals, manipulated vocals, and synth-powered chaos to bridge the universes of past, present, and future. To launch his vision of Desiderata into the corporeal world, Shemie constructed a score that was both informed by his experimental pop groundwork and destined to be played by a string quartet. Breathing life into Shemie’s orchestral maneuvers was the Molinari String Quartet, one of Canada’s most celebrated contemporary ensembles.
“It’s more composition than experimentation,” Shemie said of the album. “The band is incredible and it mixes more contemporary chamber string writing, with some improvisation and feedback. I want to write severe ‘serious’ contemporary music, but I can only go so far before I need to break out into song, so it’s partly pop, and also pretty radical at times.” To capture that lightning-in-a-bottle radicalism, Desiderata was recorded live on the floor of hotel2tango, the Montreal studio owned by Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
