Old Fire shares new single/video “Dreamless” FT. Adam Torres
Old Fire–the recording project of Abilene, TX-based composer and producer John Mark Lapham–today shared new song “Dreamless” ft. Adam Torres, the aching, haunted second single from his sophomore album, Voids. A largely collaborative album due out November 4th, 2022, via Western Vinyl, Voids features vocalists Torres, Bill Callahan, Emily Cross, and Julia Holter, as well as a myriad of musicians. “‘Dreamless’ was the last piece of the puzzle for this album. It came together spontaneously from some guitar recordings given to me by Alex Hutchins, who sent me a lot of improvised takes that I cut down and sequenced into something resembling a traditional pop structure (at least as ‘pop’ as Old Fire ever gets),” explains Lapham. “As I was imagining a vocal, I heard someone like Peter Gabriel singing and looked for someone who could give me the shivers like he could. Enter Adam Torres. Thor Harris and Bill both worked with him so it made a lot of sense that he would join our family. I gave him only a few directions on lyrical content, we talked about the themes of loneliness, isolation and what it feels like to live without love. He put together some beautiful words and really brought the song to life.” The song, out now alongside a Nathan Driskell-directed video, also features Semay Wu on cello, Christian Madden on rhodes/keys, and Joe Ryan on drums.
Voids is now available for pre-order, and “Dreamless” ft. Adam Torres follows lead single “Don’t You Go” ft. Bill Callahan—a cover of British singer-songwriter John Martyn—featuring Thomas Bartlett on piano, Wu on cello, and Robin Allender on keys/guitars. The stirring, somber track saw praise from NPR Music (#NowPlaying: “a delicate elegy with cinematic scale”), Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan (‘87 albums we're anticipating for fall 2022’), and more.
Composed of 12 genre-fluid, yet impressively cohesive tracks that span baroque dream-pop, filmic ambient, raga-like drones, avant-country, and even spiritual jazz, Voids was created over five difficult years. “I was feeling the brunt of a relationship ending, and the emptiness it left behind,” says Lapham. “Over the course of compiling the album, I lost both my parents, and the pandemic started. These recordings were born out of that loss, and that isolation. The title Voids was a natural fit.” Half the songs feature a guest vocalist, half are fully instrumental (Voids’ array of diverse musicians also includes pedal steel legend Bob Hoffnar, keyboardist Madden, guitarist Hutchins, ambient composer Wayne Robert Thomas, Warren Defever of His Name Is Alive, multi-instrumentalist Harris, saxophonist Joseph Shabason, drummers Ryan and Robb Kidd, and more), and many dovetail seamlessly into the next or are born out of parts, loops, samples, or textures of another—creating a captivating sonic collage.
In the age of remote collaboration, features can easily feel glued-on; the disparities in recording locales, artistic visions, and sensibilities sometimes compound inside each psychoacoustic detail to the point of disproportion. Voids makes clear, however, that one of Lapham’s many talents is selecting contributors whose timbres and temperaments soak effortlessly into every atom of his sonic sculptures. “I usually send a collaborator a piece of music with some general ideas of what I'm looking for, and let them develop it as they see fit. I give them some preliminary lyrics I've written, or at least some themes of what the song is about, then they write lyrics and ideas based around that,” he explains. “Sometimes there is a lot of back and forth before we get it right, and almost always there are unexpected turns in the process where it ends up being something very different from what we started with. I bring it all together, but the album exists because of their contributions.”
Lapham’s music and visual art—he doubles as a video editor and animator, and has made music videos for bands such as Goat, Throwing Muses, Night Beats, Moon Duo, Jane Weaver, and many others—are stitched with threads spun from the dissonance between his identity and the doggedly conservative cultural atmosphere in which he was raised, ventured away from by adulthood, and ultimately returned to in 2013. As evidenced by the alternating apprehension and expansion on Voids, Lapham wields his creativity as a covert weapon against his once and future surroundings as if the act of creating something, anything, is in itself defiant of the cultural, structural, and even climatic deterioration of many West Texas towns. Across the album, and through the concept of Old Fire as a project, he builds a mythical, noir-ish version of his home state and its wide open spaces, painting these fictional narratives with the music.
Read Old Fire’s full bio/download photos & album art HERE.
Adam Torres recording “Dreamless”
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