Zach Condon of Beirut has announced that his new album A Study of Losses will be out April 18 via his own Pompeii Records. Following 2023’s Hadsel, the album, in a delightful twist, was commissioned by Swedish circus Kompani Giraff for an acrobatic stage show of the same name. First single “Guericke’s Unicorn” is out now. Regarding the track, Condon explained: “Guericke’s unicorn is a supposed reconstruction of a fossil unicorn which was actually created from the bones of a bunch of different animals like the wooly mammoth and a narwhal. It’s worth looking up the image.
“I’ve always been fascinated by these kinds of bizarre chapters and odd side notes of history,” he continued, “and I wanted to reflect the unorthodox/eccentric madness of that ‘unicorn’ in a more playful song that is somewhat disjointed from the rest of the album. I think my music can have that disjointed/chaotic tendency in general, but with the whole album otherwise being somewhat uniformly baroque inspired, ‘Guericke’s Unicorn’ really makes for an outlier on this record, having its origin in an old modular synth experiment of mine.”
The album is a free interpretation of Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, the novel by German author Judith Schalansky. Honestly, this whole thing sounds more Beirut-core than anything I could have possible made up myself. I am so here for it. Check out the video for “Guericke’s Unicorn” below, and pre-order A Study of Losses here.
