Announcing I'm Full of Ghosts from Cafe Ale Out January 8th

Announcing I'm Full of Ghosts from Cafe Ale Out January 8th

by Scott Osgood

 

Announcing I’m Full of Ghosts from Cafe Ale, the music project of Los Angeles-based producer, musician, DJ, and curator Ale Cohen.

Available digitally and on boutique cassette January 8th, the first single “Talk About LA (feat. Ann Magnuson)” is out now.

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I’m Full of Ghosts unfolds like an imagined mixtape from an alternate Café del Mar. There are songs that feel relatively traditional, while others drift into ambient, built around texture rather than melody. You can hear traces of 1990s and early 2000s electronic music alongside the ever-present influence of Balearic music, as a subtle post-punk thread runs through the record.

“‘Talk About LA’ began around 2017 when I wrote its central melody for a PBS documentary I was scoring. The melody was arranged for tenor saxophone, but the cue was rejected. I revisited the piece, reimagining the melody for piano, but that version also failed to find a place in the documentary. A few years later I returned to the recording and began building a new sonic environment that transformed the piece into something stranger and more atmospheric. The result reminded me of "Providence" by Sonic Youth, and opened up an entirely new direction.

What emerged is less a song than a kind of dream state. "Talk About LA" exists somewhere between memory and imagination, familiar yet elusive. It carries a sense of beauty, but one that is shadowed by uncertainty; moments of warmth and wonder that simultaneously hint at something darker just beneath the surface.” - Cafe Ale




“This was a dream I had several years ago after I appeared on Star Trek: Picard. I played the role of Star Fleet Admiral Clancy which pitted me opposite Sir P (he said it was okay to call him that) requiring me to be really mean to him. Sir P and I got along very well but our characters had a very contentious relationship. For instance, in one scene I accused him of “sheer fucking hubris” and in another I told him to “shut the fuck up.” Apparently, those were some of the first F-bombs to be dropped on the show. That admiral was one tough, salty lass!

So Sir Patrick Stewart became deeply embedded in my consciousness and inevitably appeared in one of my dreams, alongside several others who had, at the time, passed away. When I had the dream, and when we recorded it, Sir P was very much alive. How strange that he should suddenly now be on “the other side.”

Incidentally, I write down my dreams every morning and for decades countless numbers of them have found their way into my musical storytelling and performance art including many of the Bongwater lyrics and spoken word material.” - Ann Magnuson

 

A collection of songs connected less by a strict conceptual framework or stylistic uniformity and more by how they complement one another, I'm Full of Ghosts is out January 8th on AKP Recordings.

 

Talk About LA written by Alejandro Cohen, Ann Magnuson
Vocals by Ann Magnuson
Piano by Aaron Drake
Artwork by Farbod Kokabi


AKP056