Anna Meredith: FIBS

After numerous sell out shows and critically acclaimed performances Anna will be bringing her five piece band to Somerset house to celebrate the release of FIBS - coming home to where the album was written and recorded.

Arriving over three years on from the release of award winning debut album Varmints, FIBS is 45 minutes of technicolour maximalism and almost perpetual rhythmic reinvention.

FIBS, says Meredith, are “lies — but nice friendly lies, little stories and constructions and daydreams and narratives that you make for yourself or you tell yourself”. Internally generated, they can be a source of comfort and excitement, intrigue and endless entertainment.

The album is heralded by the release of Paramour, its first single and accompanying single-take video shot in the River Rooms at Somerset House. Paramour is a song that forbids you from turning away - its sweeps, jerks and wrong turns pinning your ears to the speakers whilst heading for warp speed at a blistering 176 BPM before rounding the journey out with an (utterly unexpected) tuba-led half-time rock-out.

FIBS was recorded and produced at Somerset House Studios and is released on 25 October 2019 via Moshi Moshi.

BIOGRAPHY

Prior to the release of Varmints (2016), Anna Meredith was already well known as a writer of music for other people, taking commissions from international orchestras, operas and cultural institutions, writing symphonies, songs and string quartets, exploring boomwhackers, beatboxing and body percussion, her music being heard at the Proms, in motorway service station flash-mob performances and on haute-couture catwalks. She has been Composer in Residence with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, regularly commissioned by orchestras around the world and the first female composer to be commissioned for both the First and the Last Night of the Proms.

Other major projects included Anno (2018) - a boundary-pushing collaboration with the Scottish Ensemble, in which original pieces of her work are intertwined with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons - and Five Telegrams - a collaboration with 59 Productions, which was performed at the opening night of the BBC Proms and Edinburgh International Festival (EIF). Then, earlier this year she released her first soundtrack, for the acclaimed Bo Burnham-directed A24 (Lady Bird, Moonlight, Ex Machina) film Eighth Grade. The film was released in the UK in April, following its successful premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and a wave of critical acclaim upon its 2018 US release.