Inside Voice is a deep dive into the fascinating and personal pages of Keaton Henson’s scuffed and well worn sketchbooks, spanning over ten years of drawing and writing on benches, trains, hotel rooms and at home, it is an unfiltered glimpse into Keaton’s subconscious, as well as a beautiful art book of works without awareness.
Bound beautifully with a removable cover and printed inner cover, the pages were painstakingly curated and scanned at high resolution to capture the feeling of rifling through the real books.
16th September 2022
MONUMENT
OUT TODAY
Keaton Henson has shared his captivating new album, Monument, released today via Play It Again Sam.
Deserving of the praise Keaton’s enjoyed throughout his career to date, he is an artist who refuses to succumb to the pressures and expectations of self-promotion in 2020 with little to no social media presence, and rarely giving media interviews either. For such a tact, the music needs to do all the talking for you and crucially. Monument does that beautifully.
“It is not, I hope, a dark mud-mire of a record about grief and loss, but one about how grief and loss colour the rest of our lives, it is all the ups and downs of my past few years seen through a prism of losing people. For me the profound thing about dealing with someone’s death, is how much brighter it makes life seem in comparison. as though you have been staring at something so dark, and in such stark monochrome, that when you do look away everything else is suddenly in vivid colour, and the hopes and joys of light are more apparent than ever. So it’s certainly not that this album doesn’t have its share of the dark stuff, but it has the light, the hope, as well.”
Highlighting Ambulance as a stand-out Monument single, Keaton explains: “Ambulance is an entertainer’s cry for help, mistaken for a pop song, and applauded instead of aided. Being an artist is a great honour, but sometimes it can feel like you’re having a seizure and being mistaken for dancing.“
It is accompanied by an intricate video directed by Keaton, in the nostalgic style of a 70s children’s tv show. All told through marionette puppets, we see a character, perhaps representing Henson’s aforementioned desperate entertainer, slowly falling apart, while the camera lingers, and the bright colours remain around him.
Inside Voice is a deep dive into the fascinating and personal pages of Keaton Henson’s scuffed and well worn sketchbooks, spanning over ten years of drawing and writing on benches, trains, hotel rooms and at home, it is an unfiltered glimpse into Keaton’s subconscious, as well as a beautiful art book of works without awareness.
Bound beautifully with a removable cover and printed inner cover, the pages were painstakingly curated and scanned at high resolution to capture the feeling of rifling through the real books.
All Leaves Thus Fallen is an archive songbook specially curated by Keaton Henson, featuring lyric and chord arrangements of all his songs released to date, from the first single 'Metaphors' (2011), to the latest Fragments EP out in autumn 2021.
It also includes specially drawn 'unnecessary visual interludes' from Keaton, as well as photographs and notebook scans, presented as a beautifully sewn-bound softback book with cover design by the artist himself.
Accident Dancing is a book of poetry, detailing Keaton's life in fragments, from the chaotic to the mundane.
Accompanied by evocative illustrations, it is an intimate and unapologetically personal journey through a life the way we remember them, as Keaton puts it "chaotic, fragmented and often grammatically incorrect".
The Tallowmere Annual is a loose-narrative book of ink paintings, abstract prose poetry, and music,
Hauntingly obtuse, it tells the fragmented story of a town that never existed, Tallowmere, seemingly empty, showing only outlines of living things, words once spoken, and the sounds of distant mourning.
The text paints a broad expressionistic picture of the feeling of a fictional town, while the drawings take Keaton’s more detailed illustrative style to a heightened level of intricacy.
The first edition of the book itself has a headphone jack and MP3 pack built into the cover, allowing the reader to plug in headphones and listen to a recorded score that accompanies the book as you read.
Idiot Verse is Keaton’s first poetry collection. published first in 2015.
Predominantly in verse, and written during the first few years of life as a musician, during times of performing, recording, travelling and finding himself known.
Accompanied by crude illustrations, It is a series of poems about love, family, loss and being an artist.
Gloaming is a wordless graphic novel published by Pocko in 2012.
In an abstract way, The book acts as a field guide to a spirit world beyond our reality. It’s melancholic narrative shows spirits and creatures lost in the suburbs, lonely and seeking escape.
Gloaming was created just prior to Keaton’s career as a musician, and, reflective of his sombre and plaintive style, is an early example of his drawings and visual art.
Keaton Henson is a musician, artist and composer from England
This is a different Keaton Henson. Seven albums into his career, the musician, artist and composer returns with the announcement of his new LP, House Party, out on 9th June. House Party is Keaton as you’ve never heard him before; a conceptual and sonic departure.
Fragments EP was made as a companion piece to last year’s Monument LP, written and recorded at the same time. The eight tracks that form the EP orbit a sweeping kaleidoscope of sonic shapes, shades and textures. Keaton’s voice offers lyrics in an almost frozen romanticism. It’s a voice that sounds rooted in turmoil but also of strength. A happy sadness. Bleakly beautiful.
Monument is the highly anticipated sixth album from Keaton. It is a rare and profound thing; an album about loss, but told in incredibly candid detail, through the aspects of our lives that surround the trauma itself. About love, ageing, recovery, life; all seen through the stark prism of grief.
Six Lethargies is a long-form, conceptual work for string orchestra.
Taking three years for Keaton to create, Six Lethargies premiered at the Barbican, London, before being performed at the Sydney Opera House and the National Concert Hall, Dublin.
Musically it is an ambitious and complex work; a symphonic exploration into mental illness, trauma, and the relationship between emotion, music and neurology. It aims, in six movements, to deconstruct these emotions, and in turn, make the audience feel the effects of certain states of mind.
When performed live, a section of the audience were hooked up to monitors, taking note of their emotional states, which in turn was plugged into the lighting desk, with those audience members essentially controlling the lights in the venue with their emotional bio-data.
The album version was recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Mark Knoop, with solo violin by Thomas Gould.
Kindly now is Keaton’s 3rd studio album as a singer-songwriter. following ‘Dear…’ and Birthdays.
Kindly now was recorded in 2016, primarily written for piano and vocals, as well as guitar, with strings and orchestral elements recorded in an intimate way. Among other things, it explores the fears, trials and complexities of an artists relationship with their art and self.
Behaving (2015)
Released under the moniker ‘Behaving’, this self-titled album, is a record of dark, electronic songs and sound works. written and recorded from home, in the dark, often in one stream of consciousness take, then delicately distorted and mangled.
Romantic Works is a collection of bedroom-recorded, instrumental works for piano and cello.
It was Keaton’s first foray into instrumental, neo-classical composition, and was made in collaboration with Keaton’s on-stage accompanist Ren Ford on cello.
Released in 2013, Birthdays was the followup to 2010s ‘Dear…’.
Unlike ‘Dear…’, birthdays was recorded in studio, although written at home, Keaton recorded it in Los Angeles, with a group of musicians from Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Jesca Hoop and Matt Chamberlain, to members of Band of Horses’ and the Raveonettes.
First released in 2010, ‘Dear…’ began life as a collection of songs, written and recorded in private in Keatons bedroom, and intended to never be released. eventually, after persuasion, several home-made videos were released, leading to demand for the album itself,
It was originally released as a limited edition physical album, with each cd sleeve, sewn, stamped and the cover hand-drawn by Keaton, with the recipients name inserted into the title (hence ‘Dear…”)
after high demand the album was eventually re-released worldwide in 2012.