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Clara Sanabras releases debut produced by Harvey Brough. |
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’Hopetown House’ is the brand new album from Barcelona-born singer, Clara Sanabras and draws on all the various strands of music she has heard during her travels around the world. Now based in North London, ’Hopetown House’ is Clara’s first collection of original material, recorded with the some of the finest musicians in her adopted city, is a collaboration with top British composer and producer Harvey Brough.
The songs have many and varied themes - Forgiveness for an absent father (Good Ship Father) - Paranoia (Not a man of many words) - Contagious Laughter on another aeroplane journey (Nadie Se Salva) - all these things observed with the eye of an outsider but the spirit of a local. There are two folk-like songs “The Good Ship Father” and “First Goodbye”, the latter sung as a duet with Luke Concannon, lead singer of chart-topping band Nizlopi. Sanabras sings mainly in English but includes two songs in Spanish and one written in her native Catalan.
Musically speaking, the songs are also diverse - taking various styles Tango, Blues, a ramshackle kind of Swing, but making them distinctively her own. Clara and The Real Lowdown has been described as being like a Spanish Fairground Attraction - there may be some truth in this (drummer and percussionist Roy Dodds was a member of that band) but the band’s sound is shaped around the small (and often unusual) stringed instruments that Sanabras plays - Renaissance and Baroque Guitars, Ukelele, Mandolin, Jarana.
Towards the end of the album are two songs that nod at her classical training (she has performed a wide range of music with many illustrious groups – not only world ones like Natacha Atlas and the Mazeeka Ensemble but also the Harp Consort, Theatre of Voices and The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with a lush String Orchestra (also her close friends and colleagues) - an original song, Parable of the White Willow and La Llorona - the only song not written by Sanabras, being a Mexican folksong, but arranged by her and Harvey Brough in sumptuous fashion.
Last year, Sanabras was acclaimed by the press for her collaboration with Middle-Eastern sensation Natacha Atlas on the album ’Ana Hina’ (also produced by Harvey Brough) - for which she wrote the duet “La Vida Callada”. She invites Ms Atlas to sing with her again here, on “Perilous Divide”. A reviewer remarked that their first duet prompted the listener to wonder where songwriter / vocalist/ ukeleleist Clara Sanabras had been hiding. The answer is that she was putting together this album in her time at home between her travels.
In an impressive back catalogue of recordings, theatre and screen credits, Clara has mingled with artists from all disciplines; she appears on screen alongside Al Pacino in the ’Merchant of Venic’e movie (Mike Radford 2004), with Bill Nighy in the BBC Radio 3 play ’The Don’, worked with stage director Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre and under the guidance of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the forefather of electronica.
'Hopetown House' was mastered at Blue Pro Mastering in September 2009.
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