‘Now Their Pain is Sugar’ is the first single from Grammy Award winning composer, engineer and producer Simon Goff’s sophomore album, set for release by Grand Chess Records on 13th October. The follow up to 2021’s critically acclaimed ‘Vale’, ‘Spark Like Living Mothers’ is a project born out of a question - what happens at the moment everything stops and restarts again? To this end, the whole album has its roots in an arrangement Goff did of the beautiful choral piece ‘If ye love me’ by Thomas Talis.
A six track collection of immersive, textural and intuitive electronica, the album is testament to Goff’s multifaceted practice. The album’s lyrics were written with Sam Potter of Late of the Pier, whose work explores dreams and creates realities. Using an Artificial Intelligence algorithm that Potter has been working with for over 2 years to process and create material, the pair generated text that formed the poem ‘Spark Like Living Mothers’’ (see below). The pulsating, mesmerizing first single arrives with a video by legendary visual artist John Sanborn, which uses a combination of lidar and photometric scanning to produce instant 3D models of two performers, Sarah Cecilia Bukowski and Paunika Jones. In doing so it adopts the Japanese concept of wabisabe, encouraging the viewer to appreciate that nothing is truly perfect or permanent, and to embrace reality to survive and thrive.
‘Spark Like Living Mothers’ is also accompanied by artwork from artist, illustrator and legendary underground tattooist Ruth Marten. Furnished by Simon with the music, a poem and a brief explanation of the project, the resulting image perfectly represents the playful, creative elements of the album. In support of the release, Simon Goff will play a series of gallery shows in Germany, including NÜÜD Gallery in Berlin on 5th October and Van Der Grinten Gallery in Cologne on 9th September. ABOUT SIMON GOFF Simon Goff is a composer and producer based in Berlin, DE. He has worked with some of the world’s most acclaimed musicians as a collaborator and a sound engineer including Academy Award-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir on Joker and Chernobyl – both of which earned him Grammy Awards, as well as Jóhann Jóhansson and Apparat among many others. He also collaborated with platinum record selling artist Katie Melua, as a cowriter and producer on their 2022 album 'Aerial Objects'.
Simon recently scored the hit drama series (BBC / Paramount +), The Gold, starring Jack Lowden, Hugh Bonneville, Sean Harris and Dominic Cooper, as well as the independent Czech feature Úsvit, which is due for release in late 2023. A classically trained violinist, Goff has performed internationally with the likes of Peter Broderick, Federico Albanese and Xiu Xiu and has performed at Funkhaus (Berlin, DE) the South Bank Centre (London, UK), Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg, DE) and CTM Festival (Berlin, De).
His live shows have further cemented his reputation as an innovator of the genre, seeing him layer his performance samples of electronics and live violin, to create a textured and epic expansion of his recorded works.
