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Bay Area multi-instrumentalist LEILA ABDUL-RAUF – known for her work in Vastum, Ionophore, Cardinal Wyrm, Hammers Of Misfortune, Fyrhtu, and many others – has booked a run of Scandinavian tour dates for this fall, supporting her latest solo LP, Diminution, which saw release earlier this year.
This October, LEILA ABDUL-RAUF will perform her solo material on European soil for the first time with dates in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Selections will draw mostly from her recent albumDiminution and will also include earlier works embedded within improvisational pieces. She will be joined by Cardinal Wyrm and Fyrhtu bandmate Nathan A. Verrill who will be accompanying with multiple instruments, live sound captures, and visual projections.
Preceding the tour, a special release show for Diminution takes place in LEILA ABDUL-RAUF‘s hometown of Oakland on September 1st, with additional sets by Jessica Way (Worm Ouroboros) and Joy Shannon and the Beauty Marks. She will also perform a set at the Electronic Music Festival reception in San Francisco on September 8th.
Stream LEILA ABDUL-RAUF’s Diminution in its entirety HERE and see the video for the album’s “Hindsight” RIGHT HERE.
Purchase Diminution digitally at Bandcamp HERE, the CD through Malignant Records HERE and the LP through Cloister Recordings HERE and Black Horizons HERE. LEILA ABDUL-RAUF Tour Dates:
9/01/2018 Terminal – Oakland, CA * release show w/ Jessica Way, Joy Shannon And The Beauty Marks
9/8/2018 Adobe Books – San Francisco, CA -@ Electronic Music Festival reception
10/03/2018 Loppen – Copenhagen, DK w/ Alkymist
10/04/2018 Dunkers Kulturhus – Helsingborg, SE
10/05/2018 Matteuskyrkan – Gothenburg, SE
10/06/2018 Blitz – Oslo, NO
10/07/2018 Larry’s Corner – Stockholm, SE w/ Analfabetism
Her third solo LP, Diminution sees LEILA ABDUL-RAUF taking a more stripped-down approach to her uniquely haunting and shadowy soundscapes. While retaining a firm grasp on the feeling of urban desolation and early morning solitude, Diminution‘s tracks are generally longer than previous works and feel more spacious and open, where sparse melodies and gentle textural flow meet ethereal choral vocals, distant trumpet, delicate guitar, and luminous, yet melancholy drones and warm tonal drift. Another spellbinding work from LEILA ABDUL-RAUF for those seeking solace in quiet and introspective music residing just on edge of consciousness, Diminution was self-composed, performed, and produced, after which the tracks were mastered by Myles Boisen at Headless Buddha Mastering Lab, the album completed with artwork by Matthew Jaffe and layout by Kristoffer Oustad and James Livingston.
Noisey stated, “the brooding, ephemeral Diminution, sees her channel urban loneliness and emotional blight via a combination of delicate guitar, brooding trumpet, textural drones, eldritch chimes, and her own spare, startlingly sweet vocal stylings, which float above the mire like newly freed souls… It’s a gorgeous album, the kind of thing you’d put on when the clouds have gathered outside, your heart’s started to ache, and your last good lightbulb starts flickering.” The Quietus offered, “I’m struggling to think of many current acts travelling similar paths who are this tonally rich, their parts this carefully assembled… Diminution opens with its title track, which feels like a sort of flagship for the album: slow, gloomy, haunted piano entwines with elegiac trumpet, and very little else happens over six minutes but what one hears proceeds to envelop.” Bandcamp ran an interview which lead with, “The opening track on LEILA ABDUL-RAUF‘s third solo album, Diminution, feels like the aesthetic midpoint between depressive Danish post-black metal artist Nortt and meditative Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen. Heavy, spaced-out piano chords ring out like field recordings from a haunted house, as a trumpet, swathed in effects, croons softly in the background.” Decibel Magazine notes how her music, “often veers in unpredictable directions,” noting how the new album, “draws on ABDUL-RAUF‘s feelings about the collapse of the creative class in early 21st century America.”
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