After the announcement of their debut album Now! (in a minute) that’s due November 2nd via Heavenly Recordings. Audiobooks have shared the new track “Dance Your Life Away” along with its coinciding video.

The video features London-based dancer and choreographer Catarina Carvalho. Born in Lisbon and she boasts an artistic CV that includes Ballet de L’Ópera National du Rhin, Company Wayne McGregor (Artistic Director, multi award-winning British choreographer Wayne McGregor CBE), performing in various company works including Entity, FAR, Atomos and most recently the Jamie xx scored Tree of Codes. She continues her connection with Studio Wayne McGregor as a dance artist, assistant and re-stager along with various other independent projects as a dancer and choreographer.

Speaking about the video, audiobooks say; “We directed a video with the incredible Dancer and Choreographer Catarina Carvalho (formerly of Studio Wayne McGregor). We lit, filmed, and directed it ourselves. Catarina made a piece that really captures the energy and spirit of the track and we used one complete unedited take.”

If you’re going to call your band audiobooks, you’d better have some good stories to tell, stories that move you and stories to make you move, stories about real life and surreal life and all that weirdness that you just glimpsed out of the corner of your eye.

Luckily for you, audiobooks really do. The London based duo have developed a unique ability to conjure up magical aural snapshots that wallop you like bong hits. Each of their discombobulating observations comes stretched out over a series of discomfiting oscillations, like messages from the spirit world or pulp fictions found in a box at the end of your road or a crackling pop broadcast from a far-away galaxy.

On the face of it, Evangeline Ling – a 21-year-old art student and musician from Wimbledon – and David Wrench – one of the most in-demand mixers and producers in modern music, a sometime cohort of Julian Cope and former denizen of North Wales – might seem an unlikely pairing. Yet, a chance encounter at a mutual friend’s party just one week after David had moved south to the capital very quickly led to an experimental studio session that’s been going on ever since. The two artists comment:

Evangeline: “I’d found myself writing these odd stories as text messages on my phone. They were too short to be proper stories… they were fragments. I’d told David about them when we met and he said, “’Come into the studio and let’s put them to music.’” The next day, we started making music.”

David: “Neither of us are any good at small talk so we just got working and it was crazily fast, everything about it. We’ve never spent more than an hour on a track.”

Evangeline: “We’d work on a track and then we’d just sit and do nothing. He’d work on a mix for someone or play some records, I’d have a nap or paint or draw…”

David: “The second time Evangeline turned up at the studio she arrived in her pyjamas. She’d come all the way from Wimbledon to east London in a pair of Batman pyjamas.”

Evangeline: “I hadn’t slept all night, I’d just had this crazy adrenaline. I knew we were doing something really special and I couldn’t wait to get there. I didn’t have any clean clothes, so I just thought, ‘Sod this, I’ve got to go’.”

From their first meeting, Evangeline and David’s friendship has been influenced by the records they flipped through in his newly set up studio in Old Street. Very quickly, the pair found inspiration in music by artists as di-verse as Bauhaus, Aphrodite’s Child, Marilyn Manson, Michael Jackson, Flower Travellin Band, the Fall, Faust, Tropicáalia and Dory Previn.

Evangeline: “Dory frickin Previn, man.”

David: “Her record Mythical Kings and Iguanas is an incredible piece of work; she really was a genius. Lyrically, that’s maybe the closest link to audiobooks.”

Audiobooks
Now! (in a minute)
track listing

1. Mother Hen
2. Hot Salt
3. It Get Be So Swansea
4. Friends In The Bubble Bath
5. Womanly Blood
6. Grandma Jimmy
7. Dance Your Life Away
8. Call Of Duty Free
9. Period Talk
10. Spooky Algorithms
11. Dealing With Hoarders
12. Car Sick
13. Pebbles