Papercuts

The Clienteles I Am Not There Anymore follows 2017s Music for the Age of Miracles (which arrived after a seven-year hiatus for the band), with new recording sessions beginning in 2019 and continuing piecemeal until 2022 in part due to the pandemic and also because the band wanted the space to experiment. Wed always been interested in music other than guitar music, like for donkeys years, vocalist/lyricist/guitarist Alasdair MacLean says. This time out, he alongside bassist James Hornsey and drummer Mark Keen incorporated elements of post-bop jazz, contemporary classical and electronic music. According to MacLean, None of those things had been able to find their way into our sound other than in the most passing way, in the faintest imprint.This stretching out what MacLean calls a leap forwards and to the side can be heard clearly in Blue Over Blue, with its percussive samples and its moments where the arrangement opens up suddenly into something cinematic in scope, with horns and strings. What happened with this record was that we bought a computer, MacLean explains. Under the old Clientele way of recording, a tricky song like Blue Over Blue mightve eaten up all their studio time, as they worked out the time signature and the instrumentation. For I Am Not There Anymore, though, the trio would lay down a few tracks and then take them home to play around, trying out different arrangements before returning to the studio to finish recording all the little instrumental enhancements.