[Cover photo credit to Pooneh Ghana]
Singer/songwriter Angelo De Augustine has shared “Toil and Trouble,” the title track from his forthcoming album due out June 30th, 2023 via Asthmatic Kitty Records. The single has arrived alongside a claymation video directed by De Augustine and created by Clara Murray, which brings the album’s mystical cover artwork to life.
Angelo De Augustine comments:
As we all know, we are living in a world within another. A place of specific curation and design where the mind is the chief architect in command. I often wonder who the mind is working for? Who is behind the curtain pulling the strings and transmitting the messages?
Murray explains about the video:
‘Toil and Trouble’ takes place in a dusty room alight with magic, tucked away but teeming with magic. Flying pop-up books and a singing cauldron give birth to mystical creatures, tapped into a sorcery seemingly both wicked and holy.
Toil and Trouble sees the Southern California artist returning to the self-contained approach of his 2015 debut Spirals of Silence and 2017’s Swim Inside the Moon. De Augustine spent nearly three years working alone and exploring the expanse of his imagination, creating an a work “inhabiting a psychic landscape as sublimely mystifying as a fever dream or fairy tale.”
He wrote, arranged, recorded, produced, and mixed Toil and Trouble on his own, shaping the album’s ornately detailed sound by performing on 27 different instruments.
He comments on this approach:
This album came from thinking about the madness of the world right now and how overwhelming that can be. I used a sort of counter-world as a guide to try to gain some understanding of what’s actually going on here – I had to take myself out of reality in order to try to understand reality.
“Toil and Trouble,” “The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill” and “Another Universe” follow last fall’s stand-alone double singles “27” and “Hologram,” also recorded, produced, and mixed by De Augustine.
