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For all its atmospheric diversity, Varmints is held together by Meredith’s expert understanding of dynamics. “Pacing is a physical thing,” she explains. “I can feel when stuff has to happen in a track. I knew I wanted Varmints to end privately but start confidently, have moments of privacy and moments of power and build. I love writing a build – my friends talk about ‘the Meredith Build’! I love the feeling of ‘get on board, we’re building up now!’ Even if you’re dancing at a club, there’s an amazing transparency to a build. When somebody is creating anticipation, it’s a very communal experience and I don’t like hiding those structures.”
Varmints opens with the enormous and brassy surge of “Nautilus” which Meredith describes as: “the best version of me, the most confident and bombastic. The best I can be, with three gins!” There’s the complexity of “Shill,” a piece that Meredith conceived as a “punk palate cleanser” and a kind of “workout” for her orchestrally experienced collaborators. The thready, ticking pulse of the closing “Blackfriars,” meanwhile, crosses into new territory for Meredith, marking out a more personal course. “It’s different to everything else, it’s quite personal. I wouldn’t normally want to write about things happening to me but I did have a bit of a terrible time last year – I was a bit heartbroken – and it was the first time I’ve tried to work out a feeling like that in a track.”
Aside from sharing bills with Anna Calvi, James Blake and These New Puritans, Meredith’s dizzying CV includes being Composer in Residence for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, a piece written for MRI scanner, soundtracking PRADA’s Spring/Summer 2015 campaign, symphonies created for nursery children, music for park benches in Hong Kong and sleep-pods in Singapore. Recent performances at the BBC Proms have included collaborations with Laura Marling and The Stranglers for the first 6Music Prom, a performance of her body-percussion piece “Connect It” from the BBC Ten Pieces project and her Last Night of the Proms composition “Froms” was simultaneously performed by five symphony orchestras across the UK, was broadcast to an audience of 40 million people
www.annameredith.com
Praise For Anna Meredith’s previous single and EP releases below.
“R-Type”
“It reaches a point of screaming intensity, before unfolding all over again with even higher stakes. Come the final piercing hilt, it’s hard to believe the whole thing’s played out in under five minutes. Or it would be, if it wasn’t Meredith at the helm.”
– Pitchfork
“A rush of luminous colours and frenzied playing that ends in a bombastic frenzy.”
– Loud & Quiet
“An ever-spiralling track, ‘R-Type’ drags Anna Meredith’s classical inflections kicking and screaming into an electronic here-and-now.”
– DIY
Black Prince Fury EP
“Meredith utilises her obvious skills as an arranger to create dramatic, tension-filled nuggets”
– The Guardian
“Playful, spirited, visceral, and smart… dense, busy and isolated, but essentially fun”
– Pitchfork
“A great throb of dystopian brain freeze”
– NME
Jet Black Raider EP
“swirling, menacing electronica”
– Sunday Times Culture
“the extroverted impact and unserious charisma is admirable and rare”
– Pitchfork
“hugely impressive”
– Clash |
