ANNA Meredith returns to Scotland next week to play for the first time since releasing her second album – and becoming an MBE.
The award-winning, Edinburgh-raised composer released FIBS last autumn, three and a half years after unleashing debut studio album Varmints, a fearless, highly-lauded meld of classical, rock, eight-bit computer music and what she would describe as “club bangers”.
Bursting with ideas and a playful sense of mischief, it reveals the unique pop vision of an artist who first came to prominence with a piece to mark the reopening of Glasgow City Halls in 2006 involving local children using dustbin lids and baking trays as musical instruments.
When Varmints was named Scottish Album of the Year in 2016, Meredith’s achievements were already numerous, including becoming the first female composer commissioned for both the First and Last Night of the Proms.
Meredith’s ever-innovative projects continued with a re-imagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as an immersive multimedia event, a piece commemorating the end of the First World War and soundtracks for Bo Burnham’s coming of age film Eighth Grade and Living With Yourself, the Netflix comedy series starring Paul Rudd.
Commenting on the release of FIBS on Twitter in October, a few months after being made an MBE in the 2019 birthday honours list, Meredith reported how the 11-track album had “taken years! YEARS! of work and belief and slog and detail and love from a bunch of my absolute favourite people”, naming drummer Sam Wilson, guitarist Jack Ross and tuba-player Tom Kelly among others.
Contrary, irreverent, fun and certainly banging in places, Meredith says these eleven FIBS are based on the idea of benevolent untruths, those “nice friendly lies, little stories and constructions and daydreams and narratives that you make for yourself or you tell yourself”.
February 8, Oran Mor, Glasgow, 7pm, £16(+bf). www.432presents.seetickets.com, www.annameredith.com
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