Nwando Ebizie - The Swan (2022)

Multidisciplinary Afrofuturist artist Nwando Ebizie announces the forthcoming release of her highly-anticipated debut album ‘The Swan’, via Matthew Herbert’s label Accidental Records, on 22nd July 2022, including a special cassette tape release.

This genre-breaking album is a work of sonic fiction into the imagined world of a matriarchal community, unfolding like a time-bending ethnographic account of found sound and footage that is at once both ancient and futuristic. The project brings together Nwando’s left-field electronic experiments, cross-border musical influences, radical live art practices, and interests in Black Atlantic ritual cultures and speculative fiction.

Alongside the long-awaited album release, Nwando has been invited to curate a weekend of Black Fabulation at the Southbank Centre in London as part of the "Summer: In The Black Fantastic" season from 22-24 July. The events are an opportunity for participants to experience ‘The Swan’ over three days via a “constellation that makes up my lens of the world”. Nwando will open the gates to ritual cultures of the Black Atlantic, exploring experimental performances, guided visualisations, dance, and live music, before finally resting and resetting. Nwando says:

“I want to feature those who, like myself, fall between the cracks of artforms. Because the global minority mode of artform doesn’t satisfy. It clings to gods that I don’t recognise, to boundaries and borders that don’t allow for expansion.”

Released on 22 July, Nwando’s debut album The Swan follows on from the dizzyingly experimental heights of 2021 singles, I Seduce, and The Swan, the latter of which was chosen by Gazelle Twin as her ‘favourite song of 2021’ and was featured on Tom Ravenscroft’s BBC 6 Music’s NYE show and BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction NYE show. In addition, Nwando was also nominated for an Ivor Novello Composer award.

Nwando now announces the release of the new single ‘Myrrha’ (13 July), which she describes as “a lament. A song of sufferance, of metamorphosis. Change is painful, and Transformation is essential.” Floating along atop the Yanvalou rhythm, with a marching band interceding, Myrrha features samples by Tom Richards made on his analogue DIY synths, and saxophones by regular collaborator and the album’s co-producer Hugh Jones.

Having previously released left-field pop and electronic music under Lady Vendredi (her blaxploitation pop alter-ego), Nwando carves out a bold new Afrofuturist exploration in The Swan, her first album release under her own name Nwando Ebizie. Later this year, Nwando will tour The Swan with a live performance, supported by Battersea Arts Centre, through the Foyle Foundation.