Ferry, Bryan & Amelia Barratt - Loose Talk

Fifty-three years since he delivered the bolt-from-the-blue of Roxy Music’s debut LP as his calling card, Ferry’s latest project is just as startlingly unexpected an arrival. On the one hand, 'Loose Talk' is his first album of new music since 2014’s 'Avonmore'. On the other, little here, from the sounds and shapes of that music, to the uses it gets put to, resembles any previous Bryan Ferry album. Then again – on the third hand – it’s also a piece that is deeply rooted in his past half-century of work. “A conversation between two artists,” is how Amelia Barratt, one of the artists involved, describes 'Loose Talk'. “Something we’ve created together that neither could do on our own,” adds Bryans Ferry, her interlocutor in the creative exchange. “And, for me, it seems to have opened up a whole new chapter for my work.” Loose Talk marks the first time Ferry has created new music for another writer’s words. The album consists of eleven texts, composed by Amelia Barratt, creating fascinating micro-fictions, simultaneously fragmentary and self-contained. The album balances refined minimalism and abstraction with an experimental and youthful energy. Ferry’s music and Barratt’s texts each hold their own codes. As those codes pulse as one, the album discovers its own language – two monologues begin a conversation that becomes a duet