Cold Specks: An Intimate Evening of Music & Conversation

The Painted Lady

Join Al Spx (Cold Specks) for an intimate evening as she reflects on past work, previews her new album, and shares a special performance.

Join Al Spx, known as Cold Specks, for an intimate evening as she reflects on her past work, previews her upcoming album, and shares a special listening session with a short live performance of new material. 6:30pm | $25

COLD SPECKS – LIGHT FOR THE MIDNIGHTNew album Light for the Midnight is a new, bold work by Canadian singer, songwriter and producer Cold Specks (aka Al Spx). The heart of the album is Al Spx’ raw, intimate and emotional voice, first glimpsed on her unforgettable a capella performance on Later… with Jools Holland in 2011. This performance brought her electrifying vocals to the attention of Mute, the label she’s returning to for this, her fourth studio album.To date, Cold Specks has mixed crackling, pared-down guitar blues, gothic soul, gospel and warm electronics in three startling albums which won Polaris and Juno Prize nominations: 2012’s I Predict A Graceful Expulsion, 2014’s Neuroplasticity and 2017’s Fool’s Paradise.Her musical stretch is vast: Al Spx has worked with Swans, Massive Attack and Moby and performed at Joni Mitchell’s birthday concert. Her music always sharpens classic sounds and pushes at their experimental edges. Her lyrics can be magically abstract but also intensely real, as this first album in seven years showcases to startling effect.Light for the Midnight, a set of fervent ballads and atmospheric pop songs, is a record with expansive dimensions, reflecting all that the artist has endured and survived. Its title comes from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, Mentors, which she read while recovering from a very difficult time in her life with her mental health. Today, properly treated, supported and well, she can see things from the other side, as we listen to her singing us through those years of her life.“I thought it was a brilliant album title,” Al Spx says, “There is beauty from the ashes. Light for the midnight. I’d like it to represent an artist who has seen the pits of hell and rose to find the light.” An incredible list of collaborators came along with her, including Chantal Kreviazuk (Drake / Kendrick Lamar), Malcolm Middleton (Arab Strap), Ben Christophers, Ed Harcourt and Jonathan Quarmby. The album was recorded both in Toronto, her home city, and Bristol, in part by Graham Walsh (of Holy Fuck), with five tracks being produced by Al Spx herself, the others by Adrian Utley of Portishead and Ali Chant.“I wanted to include a sense of those emotions with my music,” Al Spx explains, “as in I never wanted to be extremely explicit with my experiences, but I wanted to be emotional with them. I definitely wanted to reflect on the last couple of years because it impacted me so much, but I also wanted the audience to walk away with this album. You know, the songs belong to them once I release them."**The story of this album begins in early 2018 when her mental health started to deteriorate on tour. Although now diagnosed with bipolar, and with the correct medication, she explains, “I had an episode that lasted most of the year that the doctors initially thought was schizophrenia, so they gave me medicine to treat it.”After a period in hospital, she moved in with her parents and five siblings after being discharged, surrounded by support, comfort and love as she started to write songs again. “It's a very traditional Somali family – you don't really move away until you get married,” Al Spx laughs. “We’re all in our thirties apart from my 21-year-old baby brother and we love it. I don't think I'll ever leave!”This house is where she fell in love with music as a teenager, her early fandom taking in boy bands like the Backstreet Boys, then Oasis and The Strokes, who she’d go to see on tours way downtown (“I was this Somali girl in a hijab listening to white boys and indie rock bands”). Later in her teens, she fell in love with the warm, rich voice of James Carr, the Memphis soul singer.Al Spx also gravitated towards older sounds of soul on Light for the Midnight. She wanted a new way of working on songs, too – and found one. “I had never really gone into a room with a writer with the idea that we were going to create a song together, but this time I did it – and my songs were so much stronger for it. I’ve found with others that I really thrive.”She emailed the Canadian singer-songwriter Chantal Kreviazuk, asking if she’d like to write with her, not thinking she would write back – and she did. Kreviazuk told her she was one of her favourite artists of all time, and they spent a week working together, writing album’s opening track, ‘How It Feels’, in the dead of night (“It was magical”). The track, which recalls where she had been before, when she was loving the chance to live her life through her music, states her predicament with a gorgeous simplicity: “I’m not greedy/ I don’t need to bring it on forever/I just want to remember how it feels.”Then came a fruitful long-distance collaboration with Malcolm Middleton, the Scottish singer-songwriter and member of Arab Strap. A “proper pop song” about love, ‘Venus In Pisces’, and the future soul classic ‘Lovely Little Bones’ emerged from their phone calls and emails. Both songs shimmer with resilience. “The world keeps burning,” Al Spx sings in the latter, “but I’m still here”.‘Cold Goodbye’ was written with producer Jonathan Quarmby (Benjamin Clementine) in Rak Studios in London. “In the room at Rak we started playing the piano and singing and wrote and recorded ‘Cold Goodbye’ in about thirty minutes. It was really quick.” Her demo vocals, fresh and blisteringly alive, are on the final recording, she adds. “Demo vocals are always better!”A torchsong-like soundworld ebbs, flows and builds throughout. It sounds mighty on the gorgeous ‘Endlessly’: “Gaze upon a wrecking ship as it crashes into you/Was I to hold it together?/Our light dimmed for the better”. On ‘Cheap Dreaming’, co-written with Ben Christophers (Bat For Lashes, Skin, Francoise Hardy), a melodic idea she wrote at home on a Fender Rhodes blooms in the studio on a sighing Wurlitzer. She also loved working with Adrian Utley and Ali Chant, a relationship that began in the studio in 2019, and continuing remotely in these recent Covid-blighted years. “Portishead are one of my favourite bands, so to have Adrian playing guitar and producing a couple of songs was essentially a dream.”Other songs reveal extra layers of the artist’s story. ‘Curse Away’ is her take on what she calls “post-break-up blues”, while the stripped-down beauty of ‘Wandering In The Wild’ is inspired by her months on the psychiatric ward (“If we survive, can we smile and be not sorry anymore/If they decide we’re free, to run and scream/Will we jump for joy?”). ‘Lingering Ghosts’ is more carnal, she laughs: “It’s about being overcome by demons and just wanting a man to take it away – if you get what I mean!”Al Spx also loves the album’s closer, ‘Closer’, and one of its central lines: “Don’t be lonely/Crawl to the sun.” This lyric reminds her of where she’s come from, and where she’s going. “I was just trying to crawl out and find the light. It reminds me how I lost my mind a couple of times, and I definitely don't want to ever lose it again, but also how this album was really cathartic to do. It needed to be done. It’s definitely something that I won't be doing again.” Al Spx is now writing new songs about other facets of reality, love and romance, she adds, other worlds. It’s our turn now, as new listeners, to take Light For The Midnight to different places.It’s also telling that Brooks’ poem ends: “Light for the midnight that is mine and theirs”. This is an album of emotions to be communicated, shared and understood – from the rear mirror view of her life and into the future, our futures, into a bolder, wider world. Jude Rogers, 2024

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Cold Specks: An Intimate Evening of Music & Conversation

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Cold Specks: An Intimate Evening of Music & Conversation

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