Welsh Music Prize winner, singer-songwriter and harpist Georgia Ruth is set to release her new album Fossil Scale on 7th October via Navigator Records. The follow up to 2013’s Week of Pines sees Ruth switching her harp for the piano, and attempting to find a more expansive, but also ambient, sound. The record was created with Italian producer Marta Salogni (who has worked with Philip Selway and Eliot Sumner) and David Wrench (Caribou, Bat For Lashes) across eleven months at Mwnci Studios.
Alongside the announcement, Ruth has also shared first single ‘The Doldrums,’ a luscious track that marries her languid vocals with strings, guitars, and twinkling piano. Speaking of ‘The Doldrums,’ she said: “’The Doldrums’ was one of the first songs I wrote for the album. I’d just moved to Caernarfon, and had become totally transfixed by the view out over the Menai Straits (a narrow stretch of tidal water about 16 miles long that separates mainland Gwynedd from Anglesey). It was absolutely beautiful. But there was something that felt ominous, something to do with the stillness of the water. And this sort of chimed with how I’d been feeling; the sometimes disconcerting stillness of being happy!”
She continued: “According to people who sail, the doldrums are a sea-state of mild inactivity, stagnation. It’s caused by low pressure and heating at the equator. My dad was in the merchant navy as a young man, and he confirmed that the looming threat of those parts of the Pacific sea are really unnerving. Coleridge has this amazing description of them in the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner: ‘Day after day, day after day, we stuck, nor breath nor motion; as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.’”
Listen to ‘The Doldrums’ below.
