Hugo Race - Fatalists

“We all met up in an old villa in rural Italy on a cold autumn day. I’d just finished a month on tour with the True Spirit and in the tour’s closing stages had come down with pneumonia. Because most of the songs I had for Fatalists were about death, this seemed a fitting background, and for the duration of the recording sessions I was laid-up with a fever in a room adjacent to the studio. I could hear the band tracking my songs but couldn’t participate. So the sessions were really produced by
Antonio and the other Fatalists, and they gave the songs a different slant. Having self-produced my recordings for a very long time I thought that here was a chance to step back and let a whole new album materialize, if I could just trust in the process. Cal and Andy mixed the album at the Mill studio on a hill overlooking the Southern Ocean where the wind blows in off the grey water with a cold metallic edge. There are few neighbours, and like the Cosabeat studio in the Romagna, a sense of nature and desolation and human insignificance predominates. I never planned to make this record, it just kind of happened – hence the title Fatalists – because often fate has other plans for us...”

The songs:

Call Her Name. In the depths of a German winter, in between summer spells in Australia and the Sahara, everything appearing further and further away. She and he were real, but at the same time just a memory. The connection still exists, stretched and tenuous from time, distance, necessity.

Too Many Zeroes. Planetary pathos is an everyday thing – to the extent that we become desensitized to it. Binary overload, so much information and not enough psychic space to digest it. As individuals we’re a transient blip on the radar of something huge and indifferent. Make of that what you can, and get used to it.

Slow Fry. Despair is useless unless you can find a way to harness it’s force. Sometimes a little grilling can get you over it, like walking on hot coals without burning your soles, the torment we endure before we choose action as its remedy.

Will You Wake Up. This song haunted me since I first heard David Creese sing it with his band, Mysteries. When Kenichi suggested we do a duet in Berlin, I taped it in Catania with friends from the Sicilian project Kill Your Song and gave it to her to sing. Antonio and Erik cut their tracks in Italy, Vicky recorded her violins at home in Arizona, the kora came from Mali and by the time we’d mixed it near Melbourne the track had been stretched right around the globe.

Coming Over. It could be about two people separated by the mass of a city, in different cities, or on different continents. We are many, we are diffused, and time and distance don’t mean what they used to.

Serpent Egg. The more I thought about this particular dream, the realer it seemed. This song became a way to exorcise it. At the centre is a third party, but her name we do not know, or she is known by many names – then you have to choose.

In The Pines. This is old Leadbelly, and before him, from way back somewhere else. It will never date because it says so much with so little to so many. There is no resolution here, no redemption, just the tall trees.

Nightvision. I was reading some reportage on clandestine operations in the Sahara desert, and listening to the Fatalists from down the hall. But the fever was high and the pages of the book erased themselves, then the paper dissolved, and there was a galaxy of stars to read instead. On careful examination, they told me nothing.

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