Group Listening share “Hills End” from new album Walks (10th May, PRAH Recordings)

Musical collaborators for the past decade, Paul Jones and Stephen Black are together known as the woodwind-and-key-wielding, sculptural-papier-mâché-hat-wearing GROUP LISTENING.

They recently announced details of new album Walks; their first collection of completely original compositions, set to be released 10th May on PRAH Recordings.

Now, they share brand new single “Hills End” [YouTube / streaming services].

“A number of nearby places had dramatic and gothic sounding names; the Valley Of Desolation and Storiths Crag. Hill End was on the map and close by, it encapsulated the feeling we had created in the music; that feeling you get when you set out on a a purposeful walk up a steep hill and the relief on reaching it’s end, exhausted but slightly elated.” – Paul Jones on “Hills End”

“Hills End, a bit like “New Brighton”, feels futuristic to me. Like Blade Runner, or Kraftwerk but with clarinets and recorders. The tune has everything you need. Propulsive drums, arpeggiators, a wind synth and two key changes too. It reminds me of driving down a motorway but getting diverted to witness a pagan ritual with burning effigies and a maypole.” – Stephen Black on “Hills End”

“Hills End” follows “New Brighton” and “Frogs”, the latter of which was praised by The Guardian for its “muted woodwind, electric harpsichord and a soothing chorus of frogs into a wistful mood fit for a vexed romance.”

Group Listening have confirmed a full UK tour for May / June in support of Walks, and have since added festival dates for July / August. All dates are on sale now.

31st May – Loves Cafe, Weston-Super-Mare
1st June – Shift, Cardiff
4th June – Kazimier Stockroom, Liverpool
5th June – Glad Cafe, Glasgow
6th June – Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh
7th June – Futtle, Fife
8th June – Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal
9th June – Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds
11th June – Colchester Arts Centre, Colchester
12th June – St Matthias Church, London
13th June – Wedgewood Rooms,  Portsmouth
14th June – The Rose Hill, Brighton
16th June – National Justice Museum, Nottingham
23rd June – Waking Life Festival, Crato (Portugal)
26th June – Dareshack, Bristol
27th June – The Grayston Unity, Halifax
28th June – Unitarian Church, Shrewsbury
29th June – The White Hotel, Manchester
27th July – Seek Out Festival, Gusburn Forest

28th July – Deershed Festival

23rd August – Wrexham Festival, Wrexham
31st August – Digital Summer Series @ Mahalla, Berlin

About Group Listening and Walks:

Following renegade reinterpretation records Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol. 1 (2018) and Vol. 2 (2022), which pulled apart, pondered, and re-shaped cult ambient classics by the likes of Robert Wyatt, Arthur Russell and Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Walks(2024) is a shining modernist monolith buried deep in the woods.

Walks draws from the field recordings of Ernest Hood; the abstraction of Harold Budd; the saxophone of Sam Gendel; the “heightened naturalism” of a Martin Parr photograph; the clarity and site-specificity of Japanese ambient, environmental & new age music of the 80s and 90s, and, prominently, Robert Walser’s pseudo-biographical novella The Walk — an appreciation of the philosophical space gifted by walks to walkers.

“Some of the places are real, while others are invented. Many of them are from actual walks that Steve and I took – mostly when on the road while touring, between shows, exploring,” says Paul Jones.

“When we first starting touring with Group Listening, both Steve and I became fascinated with going on long walks between shows, so if we had a day off we would find somewhere en route to the next show and go on a long, often aimless adventure. Sometimes we’d also take a long city walk; from Hackney to Soho in London, or an exploration of Milton Keynes, taking in its green spaces as well as its utopian modernism.”

Jones continues: “These pieces were not imagined as companion pieces to listen to while visiting a particular location (although they certainly can be used in that way), but more as a layering of notions and thoughts for places visited – redrawn as music, conjurations of feelings evoked by place. Much of the music is a celebration of random movement, of dérivistic exploration. Wandering into the drift.”

An ode to the gently psychedelic potential of wandering around in some place, any place, every place: the places in one’s own mind,Walks invites you to listen and think; to slip through the fabric of time a little or a lot, depending on how long you’ve got. Over all, to paraphrase Walser, it invites you to glow and flower yourself in the glowing, flowering present.

Walks will be released 10th May on PRAH Recordings [pre-order HERE].