Alabaster DePlume

Alabaster DePlume was born in Manchester in the early eighties as Angus Fairbairn, but his stage name comes from an unusual place, one night their company was understood to be a tirade shouted from a car as "alabaster deplume". After his apprenticeship in Manchester, he began working and creating in London, in a studio-rehearsal-room-culture-centre complex, the aptly named Total Refreshment Centre. Her first major release (her third in a row), 2015's Peach, was more in the jazz poetry category, with its raucous spoken word poems, but on subsequent releases she increasingly balanced her sound between the spiritual, chamber and nu jazz worlds, but with spoken word, jazz poetry almost always in the mix. He had already made a name for himself on the London scene in the second half of the 2010s, but the world recognized him with an unusual approach to the album.

The LP, 2022 Gold: Go Forward in the Courage of Your Love, was made by locking himself away for two weeks at the Total Refreshment Centre with different musicians, making sure that newcomers didn't have time to rehearse, but the immediate attunements shaped the birth of the tracks and the recordings. The spiritual jazz approach was thus complemented by influences as diverse as Ethiopian Afrojazz, urban soul and Japanese folk. And the uncategorisable material has been a huge success, one of the most celebrated albums of the year, even being hailed as one of the best releases by the squeamish, trend-setting Pitchfork magazine. He went on to tour with Bon Iver, and in 2023 released another brilliant album based on the same 2022 recording session, and with the second wave of this album, Come With Fierce Grace, he finally makes it to Hungary. The fresh material is perhaps the most honest and honest imprint of Alabaster's creative compositional process to date: expanding, exploring, working to deepen and further express the emotions behind his melodies. According to Alabaster, this is similar to the way in which elements of nature - bees, for example - contribute to the collective work and beauty we create together: "if a great thing wants to happen, we let it happen."