Alabaster dePlume releases a track, ‘Whisky Story Time’, from his forthcoming debut release for Lost Map Records.

The track, available to stream via Spotify, comes from ‘To Cy & Lee Instrumentals Vol. 1’, due out on February 28th digitally as well as 12″ vinyl.

Johnny ‘Pictish Trail’s Eigg-based label has collaborated with Chicago-based avant-jazz label International Anthem and the Total Refreshment Centre in London to release the new music from the Manchester-born, London-based bandleader, composer, saxophonist, activist and orator Angus Fairbairn – AKA Alabaster dePlume.

The album will be the follow-up to dePlume’s 2018 album ‘The Corner of a Sphere’, and draws together 11 instrumental tracks, recorded over eight years in cities around the UK.

Collaborators include Dan ‘Danalogue’ Leavers of The Comet Is Coming, and Sarathy Korwar.

However, most significant in the album’s birth are Cy Lewis and Lee ‘Shredder’ Bowman – from whom the album gets its title.

dePlume met the pair while working for Ordinary Lives, a charity in Manchester which supports people with disabilities to live in their own homes and enjoy fulfilling lives.

As an exercise in helping the two men learn to socialise better, Alabaster would devise and sing improvised vocal melodies with them, recording their impromptu sessions on his phone. He later began to use these scratch improvisations as templates for fully-realised recordings.

Of these creative sessions, dePlume said: “These tunes were not composed in response to the lives of my friends Cy and Lee, they are products of the times we had, while supporting each other through difficulties, and learning from one-another, about courage, people, and life.

“They’re an impression of what we found was needed, to exist, and a celebration of communication that’s free from the demands of words.”

More at lostmap.com / alabasterdeplume.com