London-based musician and multi-disciplinary artist Natasha Khan – aka Bat For Lashes – today announces the moving, feminine film ‘The Dream Of Delphi – A New Transmission’, the visual accompaniment to her upcoming sixth studio album ‘The Dream Of Delphi’ out May 31st via acclaimed label Mercury KX, heralding a new era for the three time Brit Award and Mercury Prize nominee.
While Natasha Khan has always created visual stories and films for her albums, this new era sees her pushing the creative further than ever with the ambitious release of a counterpart album film, expanding on the official music videos into an emotive, visceral exploration of the album. Produced in collaboration with creative director and choreographer Alexandra Green and directed by Freddie Leyden, the film acts as a visual score and accompaniment to the album, punctuated and anchored by the official music videos from the album’s singles.
‘The Dream of Delphi – A New Transmission’ is a visual narrative that accompanies the calling, the creating and birthing of a child, with an exploration of both the human rawness that surrounds that experience and the mythical and universal realisations that have occurred for Natasha during her journey of motherhood. The dance pieces include partner work that explores the pressures, bonding, and tenderness that occurs when lovers become parents, and the dances with the two women hint at Natasha’s relationship with the midwives, the best friends and the sisterhood she felt she so badly needed around the birth of her daughter. The choreography – based on the simple and mundane actions of everyday life – highlights the stark beauty within simplicity and mundanity, by weaving together raw emotions into a series of dance theatre moments that are emblematic of the way that a relationship changes, shifts and also breaks down; movements developed by Khan as part of her all-new live show, first teased at Meltdown Festival last summer.
Voice notes, old footage, improvised piano, snippets of voiceover and memories weave in and out of the album tracks, bringing a sometimes surreal and impressionistic collage to the soundtrack. Like a diary, this film moves through a period of about three years, reaching out to also span the timeless realms of generational patterns, ancestral connections, universal love and intelligence. The natural world, ocean, land, forests, serve as grounding and fertile backdrops and locations to the music, connecting us with the raw and wild aspects of Mother Nature and her power to heal.
This film is created, like the album, as a maternal balm and document not only for Natasha’s daughter Delphi, but for all of us, and hopes to celebrate and validate the power of the Mother for us all.
In new album ‘The Dream of Delphi’ we meet the Motherwitch: the name Khan gives to the armour she puts on when she is exploring the depths and peaks of herself in her new capacity as a parent and protector.Moments of quiet domesticity sit amongst flashes of existential wonder in these ten spiralling compositions. Lyrics about the break-up of Natasha’s relationship with Delphi’s father interweave with the place of the mother in the never-ending cycle of life, death and rebirth. Ideas and sounds both ancient and modern also mesh mesmerisingly together, pianos, bass flutes and harps blending with organs, mellotrons and the whirling sound patterns of synthesisers, inspired by her love of female and trans artists like Delia Derbyshire, Constance Demby and Beverly Glenn Copeland, and her longstanding interests in ambient and orchestral film soundtracks.
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