Wordcolour
The London-based electronic artist Nicholas Worrall creates club-focused sound collages, simultaneously child-like and complex in their nature, betraying a magpie approach to sampling which approximates digital musique concrète.
Raised in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire -- over 50 miles north of London -- he eventually moved to the capitol to pursue a career in composition and arrangement. In time, he began working on music for theatre productions and TV, composing cues for primetime BBC programs, such as The One Show and Gardeners' World. Millions in the U.K. unknowingly heard these pieces, but Worrall's passion lay elsewhere. In 2018, as a side project, he began to craft choppy rhythms with shifting tempos overlaid with disparate voices from films and online videos. He named this project Wordcolour, after a key source of inspiration, a 1994 piece by the abstract artist Paul Lansky. The following year he used "Word Color" in a Blowing Up the Workshop-hosted mix entitled I Want to Tell You Something, named after the Jenny Hval piece which closed it. Other choices for this mix -- including material by Delia Derbyshire, William Basinski, Robert Ashley, and Kate Bush -- gave further insight into Worrall's musical interests.
Barcelona's Lapsus Records soon took note and released Wordcolour's debut EP, Tell Me Something, in July 2020. The themes of communication established on his debut mixtape were again explored by Worrall on this record. Additionally, with its deep bass hits and sampled voices, this EP shared an inventiveness, eccentricity, and similar sound palette to electronic acts who broke through in the '80s, such as Yello and the Art of Noise. Inspired by a pre-COVID-19 pandemic night out at Juno Café in south-east London, Wordcolour's first EP for Houndstooth -- Juno Way -- arrived in November 2020. Although 2021 was a relatively quiet year for Worrall, he was tipped by the national press as an act most likely to break through. His second mixtape, People Can You Hear Me, appeared that year and explored themes of performance and artifice, making use of samples from Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party and Peter Weir's The Truman Show. A single, "Bluster," followed in February 2022, ahead of an accompanying EP in April, which featured remixes from DjRUM, the Soft Pink Truth, and DJ Python.
© James Wilkinson /TiVo
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Discography
18 album(s) • Sorted by Bestseller
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The trees were buzzing, and the grass.
Electronic - Released by Houndstooth on 24 jun. 2022
24-Bit 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
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Tell Me Something
Electronic - Released by Lapsus on 31 jul. 2020
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
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Tell Me Something
Electronic - Released by Lapsus on 10 jul. 2020
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
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