Peter Gabriel shares new song ‘The Court’
There is a wonderfully strange promotional rollout that Peter Gabriel is implementing for his new album, i/o. Every time there is another full moon, Gabriel will release new music. Since full moons happen roughly once every month, there’s a good chance that fans will know when the next Peter Gabriel song will come out.
Lunar preoccupations aside, the February full moon means that we’ve got another Gabriel track to parse through. This time, it’s a world-music song called ‘The Court’. Part ambient soundscape, part percussion-heavy backing track, and part electronica futurism, ‘The Court’ has an ominous mood that surrounds it. Featuring a host of traditional and non-traditional instruments mixed in with samples and other synthetic sounds, ‘The Court’ proves the notion that Gabriel is always moving into the future.
“It actually began with a Cuban loop that I was playing around with on my keyboard here,” Gabriel shared in his video update for the February full moon. “That got me going. I’m an old drummer, so I still love to find a groove and then build some ideas around it. It was sort of a good crystalizing point for the band where we locked into something that sounded, to me, different from other stuff that I’d heard, and I think that’s why it’s here: to brighten up your February.”
“I had this idea for ‘the court will rise’ chorus, so it became a free-form, impressionistic lyric that connected to justice, but there’s a sense of urgency there,” Gabriel added. “A lot of life is a struggle between order and chaos and in some senses the justice or legal system is something that we impose to try and bring some element of order to the chaos. That’s often abused, it’s often unfair and discriminatory, but at the same time, it’s probably an essential part of a civilised society. But we do need to think sometimes about how that is actually realised and employed.”
The current version of ‘The Court’ that’s available to stream and play is the “Dark-Side Mix”. As was the case with his previous single, ‘Panopticom’, Gabriel will be releasing different mixes for his songs. “I quite like this idea of the multiple mix approach because for most artists, it’s the process, not the product, that is most important,” he said. “In some ways, I’m trying to open up the process a little more for those that are interested.”
Check out the ‘Dark-Side Mix’ of ‘The Court’, plus Gabriel’s monthly full moon update, down below.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out New Music Newsletter
All the latest New Music from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.