pen·ti·men·to a visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas —early 20th century: from Italian, literally “repentance”
Carson McHone announces Pentimento, out September 12 on Merge Records. Her first full-length album since 2022’s Still Life, Pentimento finds McHone on the frontier of her musical imagination, channeling inputs as diverse and surprising as guitar rock, pastoral folk, poetry, field recordings, visual art, memory, family, and landscape into her most profound effort to date. She shares a first offering from Pentimento, “Winter Breaking”, which introduces the album’s titular traces, building itself out of birdsong and spoken word, along with a video featuring the art and work of ceramicist Alejandra Almuelle.
Carson McHone on Pentimento: “This project continues to be, really, a community effort. What began as a methodical structuring of personal artifacts kept speaking of collaboration, which allowed me to open up the process to others and bring it to life. Making the initial recording brought together a group of six musicians, but the project has expanded to include a web of many artists and disciplines. If my last album, Still Life, represents a static moment, a pause before a pivot, Pentimentois the natural next step. It’s full of movement—through time and space, through many forms… It’s a project that engages with shadow, with impulse, with paradox, and with play. I hope the record illustrates the process of integrating these things, of acknowledging the complexity of being/becoming. I am so happy to start releasing this out into the world now. So, we begin at the top, with the very opening of the album: ‘Winter Breaking’.”
It’s been a busy three years for McHone since the release of Still Life. The Austin native moved to Canada, has toured relentlessly, and released two EPs, 2022’s Camera Varda Variationsand 2024’s ODES. Pentimento, written in the Texas desert and recorded on the Canadian coast with collaborators Colleen Coco Collins, Michael Cloud Duguay, Raha Javanfar, Steven Lambke, and Daniel Romano, is a layered compilation of life’s shifting circumstances and the disquiet of the world at large.
McHone will embark on a summer tour of Europe with Daniel Romano in July. US and Canadian tour dates are in the offing—including a listening party and multi-disciplinary performance of Pentimentofor In the Soil Arts Festival: Harvesting the Soil in St. Catharines, ON, on September 12, the night of the album release, and a month-long Texas residency in October
Tracklist
1.Winter Breaking
2.Abstract Spring
3.Downhill
4.Vision in the Verse
5.In the Summer the Streets Burned
6.Idiom
7.Fruits of My Tending
8.Forbidden Kiss
9.The Canvas
10.Lucentum
11.Wake You Well
12.Triumph of the Heart
13.September Song
https://lnk.to/Pentimento