clientele: music for the age of miracles

THE CLIENTELE return with Music for the Age of Miracles, their first release of new music since 2010’s Minotaur EP. After The Clientele released Minotaur, ALASDAIR MACLEAN, singer and principal songwriter for the band, made two wonderful albums with Lupe Núñez- Fernández as AMOR DE DIAS, issued a Clientele best-of called Alone and Unreal, oversaw reissues of Suburban Light and Strange Geometry, and played shows. He and Lupe have also been raising a family, so the prospect of a new Clientele record seemed to be diminishing. It seems fitting, then, that a chance meeting with a ghost from the past/future is what led to Music for the Age of Miracles, the first album of new Clientele songs in seven years. MacLean and ANTHONY HARMER knew one another and played music together in the mid-1990s but had lost touch. “I had often wondered what had happened to Anthony since,” writes MacLean. “It turned out—he told me—he’d studied the Santoor, an Iranian version of the dulcimer, and over decades become a virtuoso, at least by my standards. He suggested we have a jam together. Ant and I now lived three streets away from each other, it turned out. He started to arrange my songs. He let me write and sing them, and he came up with ideas for how they should sound. This carried on until we had an album. I called up JAMES and MARK and asked them if they wanted to make another Clientele record. They did, and this is it.” includes download.