Today, Zach Condon has announced the release of the largest and most unexpected Beirut album to date. Out April 18, on his own Pompeii Records, A Study of Losses is an 18-track odyssey commissioned by Swedish circus Kompani Giraff, which is an acrobatic stage show of the same name. The album journeys through eleven songs and seven extended instrumental themes that is named after the lunar seas and inspired by the chilling tale of a man obsessed with archiving all of humanity’s lost thoughts and creations.
A Study of Losses is the second new Beirut album in just two years and the continuation of another characteristically prolific chapter for Condon. Following half a decade spent recovering from persistent throat issues and impending mental collapse, which left him questioning whether he would ever perform in front of an audience again, the album arrives on the heels of Hadsel, which marks a new beginning for Beirut.
Along with the exciting album news, Condon has shared the song “Guericke’s Unicorn” and while talking about his latest ditty, the artist said: “Guericke’s Unicorn’ is a supposed reconstruction of a fossil unicorn which was actually created from the bones of a bunch of different animals like the wooly mammoth and a narwhal. It’s worth looking up the image.”
Condon adds: “I’ve always been fascinated by these kinds of bizarre chapters and odd side notes of history and I wanted to reflect the unorthodox / eccentric madness of that ‘unicorn’ in a more playful song that is somewhat disjointed from the rest of the album. I think my music can have that disjointed / chaotic tendency in general, but with the whole album otherwise being somewhat uniformly baroque inspired, ‘Guericke’s Unicorn’ really makes for an outlier on this record, having its origin in an old modular synth experiment of mine.”
A Study of Losses Track List
- Disappearances and Losses
- Forest Encyclopedia
- Oceanus Procellarum
- Villa Sacchetti
- Mare Crisium
- Garbo’s Face
- Mare Imbrium
- Tuanaki Atoll
- Mare Serenitatis
- Guericke’s Unicorn
- Mare Humorum
- Sappho’s Poems
- Ghost Train
- Caspian Tiger
- Mani’s 7 Books
- Moon Voyager
- Mare Nectaris
- Mare Tranquillitatis
Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat
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