Boa Morte return with new album The Total Space

Veteran alt-folk outfit Boa Morte have released their new record, The Total Space via Gare du Nord records. The group’s latest release sees them delve deeper into the world of ambient, drone and synthesised sound, with little but their melodic intuition and instinct for unorthodox sound to guide them.

Produced by Daniel Presley, the perma-nomadic texan was flew in to safeguard the Cork band’s fundamentals: emotive vocals without straying into sentimentality; a disquieting sense of ease encompassed by space and silence; percussive interventions; and harmonies that contribute to their music’s personality.

In order to disrupt their fundamentals, several techniques were employed by Boa Morte. Home-studio, band-room and attic recordings in a more open-ended recording process were used to complement the core Black Mountain tapes.

The group also got used to bouncing ideas off each other via laptops; intros and outros took shape and evolved this way, and whole song segments were overhauled or deleted entirely, with the group often unable to meet in person. The resulting collection is some of Boa Morte’s best work to date.

Composer Justin Grounds was a key component in the record’s formation. Grounds worked with the band to retain modern elements of composition like repetition, a minimalist mindset, and structural fluidity, which in turn, honed the Cork outift’s mindset for sound.

As a result, the process called for more expressive gear with Juno 106, Deepmind12 and something called TC Plethora X5 having infiltrated each track on The Total Space.

Perhaps a cosmic distress signal, or a remote aural beacon, The Total Space may just be the record whereby Boa Morte have officially found a home for their voice- a long way from their humble beginnings on the small record label run by Teenage Fanclub’s Francis MacDonald.

Boa Morte are set to perform upstairs in Whelan’s on May 11th. Tickets from €11 are available here.

They are also due to feature on the next episode of Paul McDermott’s podcast To Here Knows Where.

Directed by Max LeCain, stream ‘Mountain’ from the new album below.