Belle And Sebastian at Pitchfork Paris 2019 (Jessica Bartolini for Live4ever)
Belle And Sebastian have posted the first part of a new collaborative project with their fans entitled Protecting The Hive.
The band invited fans to submit their experiences with the current enforced self-isolation, and have put these into a spoken word piece narrated by Stuart Murdoch and friend of the band Alessandra Lupo, accompanied by visuals from Kenny MacLeod which present an aerial view of a deserted Glasgow.
The second part will arrive this Friday, when the band plan on uploading a work-in-progress demo based on the same contributions from fans, who’ll then be given the chance to build their own composition from the demo using its original audio files.
“OK, I’ve got an idea,” Murdoch said when starting the project. “I come up with lots of tunes but the band aren’t around just now, and I rely on them to turn them into pop. How about we make a tune together using remote technology?”
“Send me a few sentences or a paragraph, I’ll try to funnel those words into a song, then I’ll record an acoustic version of it and bounce it back to you. Then it’s up to you to do what you want to do with it! You have GarageBand, Zoom, whatever. A collaboration. Someone might be good with tech. Someone might want to sing it. Can you put a rhythm to it? Someone add some organ, some flute! At this point it’s out of my hands.”