Blank Project (LP)

Following last month’s annou­ncement that Neneh Cherry will release her first solo album in 16 years – a collaboration with RocketNumberNine, produced by Four Tet, and featuring a guest appearance by Robyn – Neneh is now ready to share further details of this forthcoming record with the world. The 10-track album, recorded and mixed over a 5-day period, will be titled Blank Project, and it will be out on Monday 24th February on Smalltown Supersound. It follows 2012’s The Cherry Thing, a collaborative record with free jazz, noise collective The Thing, which featured new versions of songs by The Stooges, MF Doom, Ornette Coleman, amongst others. While her energy and demeanour may not have changed since the days of Rip Rig + Panic, musically, Blank Project is a departure from anything Neneh has previously done, initially written as a means of working through personal tragedy. What stands out upon first listen is the album’s sparseness: loose drums and a few synthesizers are the only accompaniment to Neneh’s wildly poetic, sometimes-spoken, sometimes-screeching, soul-flooded and raw vocals. The space created by this minimal aesthetic leaves room for occasional pistes and flurries of rapid, yet throbbing and thunderous instrumentation. Featuring combined elements of beat poetry, avant-electronica and beautiful vocal melodies, it’s a record that uses simple ideas to create something entirely original. And despite the personal struggles Neneh was working through in writing this new material, the songs are far from introverted. As many are aware, the stories from Neneh’s early years are astonishing. She spent her childhood living 50/50 between a loft in New York and in the South of Sweden with her mother and stepfather, the legendary jazz musician Don Cherry. She's been lifted onto Miles Davis’ lap, Allen Ginsberg regularly passed through their home in an evening and as she got older, she could pop in on Arthur Russell, Talking Heads and The Modern Lovers who all lived in the same loft complex in Long Island City, New York. At 14, she started taking trips to Harlem with Ari Up of the Slits at a time when few would venture so far uptown. Soon after, she left home and moved to London, and spent the next 20 years inside the crucial developments in British subculture. As post-punk became the site of 80s Britain’s artistic and political resistance, she helped form the anarchic multi-ethnic, multi-genre Rip, Rig + Panic, and she was one of the first to bring hiphop culture to a British audience with “Buffalo Stance” and Raw Like Sushi. Although at points her career had brushes with the mainstream, Neneh remained staunchly counter-culture. Through post-punk’s adherence to mixed-race line-ups and anti-government stance, to UK rap’s refusal of the conventions of pop, triphop’s con­nection with the politicized elements of rave culture and, through 1996’s Man, where Neneh introduced elements of Senegalese language to mainstream audiences for the first time via the mammoth “7 Seconds” single featuring Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour, and now, with Blank Project, Neneh continues to arrive at moments in musical history when there is an opportunity to subvert ideas of popular culture. She is subverting once again, only this time, although this record is musically bold, Neneh sees the stasis she’s challenging isn’t musical or societal, but her own. Contains vinyl + CD version of album Review: Compared to Neneh Cherry's three proper solo albums, the last of which was released in 1996, Blank Project is from another dimension. It's in line with her post-punk roots in the Slits, Rip Rig & Panic, New Age Steppers, and Float Up CP and, to a lesser extent, her 2000s output with family affair cirKus. Blank Project is also something of a continuation of The Cherry Thing, a 2012 album on which she was backed by the Thing – a Scandinavian jazz trio inspired by her stepfather Don Cherry. Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet, remixed that collaboration's co­ver of Suicide's “Dream Baby Dream,” and he produced these songs, with instrumentation from by RocketNumberNi­ne's Ben and Tom Page. Cherry co-wrote all the material with varying combinations of writers, including the Pages, longtime creative partner and husband BoogaBear, the late Cole Williams, Paul Simm, and Hebden. Recorded briskly in five days, the album begins with a chill in the form of “Across the Water,” where sparse, crawling percussion accompanies Cherry as she grieves, “Since mother's gone, it always seems to rain” and “My fear's for my daughters.” The title track then propels the album into the first of several stark pieces that involve the Pages' hurtling drums and protrusive synthesizers. Their work suits baleful and agitated words that have sharpness even when Cherry delivers them with sweetness. Nervous energy – taut and circular drum patterns, sing-songy vocal projections, raw barbs – rarely recedes. When it does, as on “Spit Three Times” and “422,” the results are just as penetrating. In the former, Cherry casually flicks “You're addicted to me/Leave me alone” and then, seconds later, trails off with “I'm addicted to you.” The latter is one of the bleakest and most moving moments in Cherry's career, if only for “Thoughts that curl up your toes/All the bullshit that gets up your nose.” Friend Robyn joins in on “Out of the Black,” but the mood hardly lifts, with imagery of tied hands, mourners, and wolf packs over steady drums and tremulous synthesizers. From front to back, Blank Project is riveting uneasy listening. All Music Guide – Andy Kellman Track Listing: Side A: Across the Water Blank Project Naked Spit Three Times Weightless Cynical 422 Out of the Black (featuring Robyn) Dossier Everything