What’s Adam Green been up to?
Like what feels like the rest of the Western Hemisphere, we have a soft spot for Adam Green. Maybe it’s the fact that he emerged from the prolific downtown New York anti-folk scene of the late 1990s, but he’s carried on experimenting and making new music in the ensuing years, never resting on the laurels of his previously-acquired cult fame with The Moldy Peaches.
What’s Adam been up to lately? Well, the polymath’s newest book War and Paradise is a graphic novel that combines his lyrical and visual vocabulary. The satirical war epic is about the clash of humans with machines, the meeting of spirituality with singularity, and the bidirectional relationship between life and the afterlife.
His 10th solo album, Engine of Paradise, is a musical exploration of these same themes. Recorded in Brooklyn by Loren Humphrey, the forthcoming album reimagines the baroque orchestral style of his early 2000s era records and features performances by MGMT’s James Richardson, Florence Welch and Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado.
Fun fact: at the start of summer a friend of Mr Green’s decided to recreate the studio equipment Serge Gainsbourg used to make his 1971 masterpiece Histoire de Melody Nelson, and then recorded the album there.
What’s the gateway track to listen to right away? It’s got to be the deceptively simple Freeze My Love – listen here.
Catch Adam performing in EartH’s Theatre on Tuesday October 22.
By Ava Szajna-Hopgood