MCD presents- Wintersleep

WINTERSLEEP

Wednesday September 25 th 2019

The Grand social

Tickets from €15 incl booking fee on sale Friday 24 th May at 10am from Ticketmaster

Strictly over 18’s

Wintersleep announces headline show at the Grand Social.

“The average Canadian carries around with them in their head a vision of spaciousness.” So theorized

Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, describing a so-called ‘Canadian sound.’ For Schafer and many others,

it was a sound defined by space, by the land and our distance from and proximity to it. For Harry Freedman, it

was “gaunt” and “lonely.” Elaine Keillor called it “immense, empty, mysterious, harsh, indifferent, producing a

response of awe mingled with terror and an intense sense of spiritual loneliness.”

On Wintersleep’s seventh full-length record, In the Land Of, this geography is both real and imagined. It is

understood that our surroundings are not, in fact, essential or concrete elements; they’re constructed in

relation to us, the inhabitants. Our identities, too, are constructed in relation to the land. The land, both

physical and figurative, changes, and so do we. Familiar land. Foreign land. Inhospitable land. Unceded land.

Stolen land. Dead land.

This might be why In the Land Of doesn’t inhabit one terrain, but many. It might also be why none of these

terrains feel comfortable. “I don’t really feel 100% at home anywhere,” says vocalist and guitarist Paul

Murphy. “Over time, that’s something that weighs a lot on me, not feeling really connected to my

environment.”

Like all Wintersleep records, In the Land Of encourages thought and introspection. The new record’s title is an

incomplete thought, a blank that is filled in across the record with different places, words, and sounds. “A lot

of the songs touch on this idea of being a stranger or feeling foreign in all the different landscapes in which the

songs took place lyrically,” explains Murphy. “It all relates back to the land,” adds guitarist Tim D’Eon.

It’s the direct result of feeling like a stranger somewhere, of feeling alienation so intense it must be dissolved

before it constricts. In the Land Of is about that alienation: from the self, from others, from the world around

us. These are all lands we occupy, ones which we must know and explore and surrender ourselves to. Keillor’s

“spiritual loneliness” was not, after all, a product purely of the self. It came from how we exist here; it came

from the land.

Wintersleep will play The Grand Social on Wednesday September 25 th with tickets from

€15 incl booking fee on sale Friday 24 th May at 10am from Ticketmaster

Strictly over 18’s