Neil Gaiman and the Australian FourPlay String Quartet have announced their debut collaborative album, Signs Of Life.
FourPlay gained worldwide fame for their interpretations of music that doesn't typically sit in the format, such as covering songs by Metallica, Rage Against The Machine, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, the Doctor Who theme, The Strokes, and more. The group are longtime friends of Gaiman; their collaboration was born in 2010 when FourPlay was commissioned by the Sydney Opera House's Graphic Festival to compose a 70-minute soundtrack to Gaiman's novella The Truth Is A Cave In The Black Mountains for a live performance with him.
The album will be released on 28 April 2023 via Instrumental Recordings. Shaun Tan designed the cover art. Gaiman and FourPlay have also unveiled the first singles from Signs Of Life; both couldn't be further apart. Bloody Sunrise is theatrical in nature, featuring music and backing vocals by Gaiman and lead vocals by Lara Goodridge. The James Chappell-directed video comes just in time for Halloween, with Talia Benatar playing a lovelorn vampiress. Credo, meanwhile, resembles an audiobook read by Gaiman to strings that slowly unfold as the track does.
On Signs Of Life, Gaiman said, "I'm not entirely certain when I fell in love with a string quartet. I remember our first date, though. It was a day spent in a tiny room somewhere in the backstage maze of the Sydney Opera House. We played the next night on the stage of the Sydney Opera House. It was remarkable. It was so much fun we did it again.
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"We did a tour together, but when we reached Carnegie Hall, we decided we needed something better than me reading a poem as our encore, so we stole some time from soundcheck and rehearsed a song. And then we performed our song on the stage of the Carnegie Hall, and that felt a lot like something special. We started to build a repertoire, and when I was in Australia, we would make music together. These are some of the things we've made together. It's been a long fallow winter, the last two and a half years. Here are signs of life."
FourPlay also cherished the experience, sharing, "Neil's mastery of storytelling and his crafting of words is second to none. Among the members of FourPlay, we have been fans of Neil's for many years, and it was a golden opportunity to work with him. Nevertheless, we could never have expected to find him to also be such a master of pacing, such a musical performer and wordsmith. We're joyful to count him as a friend as well as a collaborator, someone we spend pleasurable time with and someone we never fail to create beautiful, glittering things with."
Neil Gaiman, ever the chameleon, creates worlds that transcend genre, age and format; and arcs across novels, television, film, short stories, comic books, radio plays, theatre and now, music. Following the adaptation of his novels Good Omens (co-written with Terry Pratchett) and American Gods on Prime Video, his beloved comic series, The Sandman, has been adapted for Netflix with great results: it held the #1 spot globally in Netflix streaming for several weeks.
Pre-order Signs Of Life and buy merchandise here.
