Announces full UK tour for Jan 2017 including Londons Barbican

Announces full UK tour for Jan 2017 including Londons Barbican

Today, King Creosote (otherwise known as Fife’s Kenny Anderson) releases his new beautiful album Astronaut Meets Appleman. It explores the tension and harmony between tradition and technology – between analogue and digital philosophies – and also invokes a feeling, King Creosote says, of “being caught between heaven and earth”.

Having sold out his show at London’s Hoxton Hall next week, King Creosote will be playing an additional set earlier that evening at Rough Trade East. He has also confirmed a UK tour for January 2017 – full dates below.

Astronaut Meets Appleman follows KC’s breakthrough record From Scotland With Love (2014) and his Mercury-nominated collaboration with Jon Hopkins, Diamond Mine (2011).    

The KC idiom – equal parts geometry, self-deprecation, cosmic wonder and seafaring poetry – remains intact on Astronaut Meets Appleman, as does his knack for a killer couplet (see drive-pop calypso ‘Love Life’: “Her jealous accusations know no bounds / Scarlett Johansson was never in my house”). But there is a renewed sense of space and letting the music breathe (lead, even) on the album – all the better to showcase a stunning ensemble cast that includes Catriona McKay (harp), Mairearad Green (bagpipes), Gordon Maclean (double bass), Hannah Fisher (violin, vocals), Sorren Maclean (guitar, vocals) and Pete Harvey (cello), alongside KC's regular rock diviners, and his baby daughter Louie Wren (on ambient reverie, 'Peter Rabbit Tea').

“I wanted to push myself songwriting-wise, so I went in with hardly anything and had to wing it,” KC reveals. “I wanted to try and flip the clock all the way back to sound like a younger me – or a less cynical me. In the past, I've been fixated on twisting and wrenching every line, but here I've let that go a bit, and I hope that lets you concentrate more on the music; on what’s going on around it.” 

“I always feel I’m reaching for something, but I never get there, I wanted to get out of the usual places” KC muses, and this is reflected in the album's geography, which is more far-flung than usual. It was variously recorded at Analogue Catalogue in Ireland's County Down, An Tobar on the Isle of Mull, and Glasgow's Chem19 studios (HQ of long-time ally Paul Savage, who co-produced the LP with KC).

On Astronaut Meets Appleman, King Creosote is still upsetting apple-carts and dealing with the fallout, still appraising love and life, the moon, the stars; tide tables, bagpipe scores, zeros and ones; mathematics, ticking clocks and the beat of our hearts. 

Astronaut Meets Appleman is available as a one press only deluxe vinyl edition with exclusive etched 10”, alongside standard LP, CD and digital formats. Initial Domino Mart copies of the deluxe vinyl will come with a signed artwork print.