Friday, PJ Harvey made international headlines when she announced her new album will be recorded in front of a live audience at London's Somerset House. Members of the public will be able to watch the sessions in 45-minute windows, a process that collaborator Michael Morris is calling a "lottery."
Morris, the co-director of Archangel, said he's been planning this project with Harvey for more than a year.
"Polly's approach to songwriting and making films is very much like that of a visual artist and we got talking about how the process of making a record could be displayed rather like an exhibition and what that might feel like," Morris told The Guardian (via NME).
Some patrons will get to see excellent musical takes, and others will watch nearly an hour of instruments being tuned before they get shuffled out of the auditorium.
"It will be warts and all," Morris said. "There will be some visitors who experience longueurs, the tuning-up of a bass guitar, the integration of a horn section. There will others there when she happens to run through a couple of songs from start to finish. It is very much a lottery."
This has the feel of an avant garde performance, but Morris doesn't want anything to do with that word.
"We have deliberately avoided using the word performance because we don't want to build up the wrong expectations," he said. "The truth is none of us really know what it will be like. Polly doesn't know. We don't know. We think we have an idea but I suspect we'll be surprised when it unfolds. It is uncategorisable."
The 45-year-old Brit last dropped an album in 2011 with Let England Shake, which featured "The Glorious Land."
