AFTER yesterday’s powerful live stream in solidarity, remembrance, rage and consciousness-raising marking the 75th anniversary of the devastating nuclear destruction of Hiroshima, politically acute Super Furry Animal Cian Ciarán today releases the single-cut version of the track from that six-hour stream, “Are You Down With Me”, in which wordsmiths Jehst and Wibidi use speech as their hammer.
It forms the latest in a precisely calibrated series of monthly tracks leading into his collaborative album, Hero Leader God.
Ciaran is a committed campaigner against the “immoral, outdated, expensive and dangerous nuclear industries in the UK and internationally”, and bore witness in a shifting, thought-provoking six hours, timed precisely from the moment the Enola Gay took off to that of detonation, with an eerily time-stretched run through his new track.
He said:“That humanity sank so low as to use its scientific ingenuity to cause such devastation and suffering on such a mind-blowing scale in August 1945 is worth a moment of pause.
“But what’s the difference between now and then, when we still invest in nuclear warheads we ’ll never use? When there are so many alternatives, we should ask why politicians and industry still put fear and self-interest above people.”
The question “Are You Down With Me” asks over a bright break and hazy, woozy sonics, is as simple as it powerful.
As 2020 warps ever further into a bad pulp fiction dystopia, Jehst, Wibidi and Ciaran posit: are you with them or are you with us?
The album Hero Leader God, set for a winter unveiling, will feature a host of collaborators including She Drew The Gun, Steve Mason and the fierce intelligence of Birmingham poet Stephen Morrison-Burke. It’s gonna be a musical call for us all to wake up.
Connect with Cian Ciarán on Twitter, Facebook and Bandcamp.
