Premiere: Georgie McVicar ‘In Transports of Joy’

Georgie McVicar will release their new album, ‘Tiny Grassland’, via Mutualism this month.

The UK artist's third album comes accompanied by a book, the contents of which are paired with the release’s seven experimental electronic tracks. Featuring poetry, short essays, a catechism, a play, interviews and more, the book provides an engrossing, puzzling pairing for the music, becoming the embodiment of the very themes it seeks to explore: the relationship between reading and listening, the contexts in which we hear and discover music, and the associations we form through that experience.

When listening to ‘Tiny Grasslands’, with its minimal, rhythmic compositions, microscopically adorned with vocal snippets, swooping melodies and plumes of bass, you can find yourself wondering if anyone’s experience listening to these, or any, pieces of music is ever the same. Tiny electronic flurries may appear incidental to some, but will be the hook that lures someone else back in again and again. A melody might linger in my memory, but it’ll be the drums that rest in yours. When heard in tandem with the book, and the myriad ways that can be read, the permutations of the listening experience feel almost endless, and that’s exactly the point. 

The album’s second track, ‘In Transports of Joy’, is an eight minute exercise in rhythm and movement, built on a hypnotic percussive pattern, which erupts into a flurry of crashing drums and muttering voices. The track balances its dizzying energy with incredible subtlety, and when paired with its accompanying book chapter, an interview between McVicar and Gribs that touches on “movement, muscle memory, exercise, dancing, the body, the earth” and more, its frankly thrilling. 

“For ‘In Transports of Joy’, I started compiling a list of names, mostly authors and actors, but also from student registers, sports games, obituaries and so on,” says McVicar of the track. “They started out as just placeholders, but eventually formed a kind of patchwork of names which I think gives the music this busy, claustrophobic effect. I like that the track feels like a big milieu, on its way to somewhere, where all the sounds and people are shuffling around and bumping into one another.”

Check it out below, and pre-order ‘Tiny Grasslands’  ahead of its official release on 17th August, here.