Cate Le Bon on heartache, healing and Michelangelo Dying

Cate Le Bon’s seventh studio album Michelangelo Dying chronicles a devastating heartache and confrontation of self for the Welsh artist, and though it was not the record she thought she would write it’s the one she needed to.

“I was documenting something in real time. There were these really hard lyrics that were coming up…it was just about allowing myself to have this vacant mind and allowing myself to really unclog myself of all these emotions. Allowing these lyrics that felt brutal and vulnerable be shown the light of day…you stare something down and you heal”.

Michelangelo Dying is a wonderfully iridescent and deeply human work which meditates on heartache, healing and catharsis, described as an attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up but in doing so, you can’t help picking at it too.

Referencing Colette Lumière’s installation Real Dream as inspiration for the album’s feeling, Cate nods to the overarching timelessness of love experienced through art with it’s title.

“To me it’s (an album) laden with the emotion I can’t find the words to express, but it’s there in the arrangements and the layering…”

The record sees Cate continue her control of playing and production alongside Samur Khouja, and what emerges is silky, sludgy, porous hypnagogic-pop which plunges you head first into the wild depths of her interior world.

“I wanted to have things be angular but have these soft edges and work on the intricacies of how instruments play with each other. I like to bring music and lyrics into formation at the same time so they are married emotionally.”

Made between the Grecian island of Hydra, Cardiff, London, and Los Angeles, and ultimately finished in the Californian desert, Michelangelo Dying seems to belong to itself, carefully surreal and seductively dizzy with the pain of remembering, choosing and changing.

Pamela Boland spoke to Cate Le Bon about the creation of the record, collaboration and connection in performance.