Prelude

Album: Holy Fire (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • ‏Foals kick off their third album Holy Fire with this instrumental. Their vocalist Yannis Philippakis told NME: "We all got entranced by the groove: we've got these recordings where it's 25 minutes long, because there's just something really cyclical about the loop. We just wanted it on the record and that evoked a lot of that swampiness and there's a menace in it. Plus it cleans the palette, it burns away, it allows the record to start fresh."
  • Several Holy Fire tracks including this one feature the sound of bees in the mix. The buzzing noise of the honey-producing insects was recorded Down Under with Australian musician Jono Ma long before the London sessions for the album with Flood and Alan Moulder. Philippakis told NME: "There's something sonically incredible about the way bees sound. Its fu--ing great. Also, we recorded some stuff in Australia with Jono Ma - he set up some mics outside, there was insect life everywhere getting recorded as we did vocal takes. I wanted that swampy. organic prescience. And Bees' fates are inextricably linked with our own. Its such a cataclysmic event (their decline) but its tiny (in comparative scale to humans). I like the fact that its this tiny thing but its huge. A weird double perspective."

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