Credits:

A Beginner's Mind

Description:

Sufian Stevens and Angelo de Augustin complete their collaborative album. The album, A Beginner's Mind, based on a popular film and created with a Zen/Buddhist originality, is released. A Beginner's Mind began with a month-long songwriting sabbatical for two Asthmatic Kitty labelmates at a friend's cabin in upstate New York. Watching movies to relax after their daily work, they realized that their songs were reflecting the movies, and they began to seriously investigate this relationship. The resulting 14 songs, the majority of which are based on popular films, were written in tandem. They wrote the songs in tandem. One wrote the verses and the other the chorus, mixing chord progressions and lyrics, sometimes completing each other's lyrics in the process. The result of their meticulous editing and rewriting was not an "interpretation of the film," but an "unstoppable philosophical exploration" that allowed them to relate the songs freely. The two wrote all the songs with shoshin (first thoughts). This is the Zen Buddhist concept that gives the album its title, of looking for unlikely inspirations and writing about them, without any preconceived notion of what the film is trying to say.In the process, the I Ching and Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies also served as an incentive. As a result, the film became a rhetorical stimulus, allowing their own clear responses and creative instincts to dominate their process. Empathy and openness were the underlying objectives, which were to be observed with the eyes of a child, devoid of judgment. The artwork for the album was done by Ghanaian artist Daniel Anum Jasper; in Ghana in the late 80s, to promote a film, artists painted posters with only a little information about the film. The two commissioned Jasper, a pioneer of the form, to do the work; information about the project was deliberately kept vague so that Jasper could work freely. Sufjan Stevens is an artist, songwriter, and composer living in New York City. Along with nine widely acclaimed studio albums, he has released a number of collaborative works with fellow musicians, choreographers, and visual artists. These include the New York City Ballet, renowned filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, his stepfather Lowell Brams, and renowned dancer Jalaiah Harmon.Angelo De Augustine is a songwriter/artist based in Thousand Oaks, CA, a northern suburb of Los Angeles where he grew up, and independently released his debut album, Spirals of Silence, in 2014. He has since released two albums on Asthmatic Kitty, "Swim Inside The Moon" (2017) and "Tomb" (2019).

Tracklisting:


1. Reach Out
2. Lady Macbeth In Chains
3. Back To Oz
4. The Pillar Of Souls
5. You Give Death A Bad Name
6. Beginner's Mind
7. Olympus
8. Murder And Crime
9. (This Is) The Thing
10. It's Your Own Body And M ind
11. Lost In The W orld
12. Fictional California
13. Cimmerian Shade
14. Lacrimae