And Who Shall Go to the Ball and What Shall Go to the Ball? (Limited Edition)

"Walker has turned in a series of oblique and angular strokes of the musical brush… a master of his entrances and exits, Walker gathers all the loose ends thrown up in to the air… distilling them… and thus providing the album with a powerful sense of mournful resolution."
- BBC

"…another way to engender drama is to simply be Scott Walker… {he} has banked lots of reasons to be taken seriously no matter the context, and that figures highly into hearing this record…"
- Pitchfork

In '06, Scott Walker confirmed his position as one of the most singular talents working in any field of the arts by releasing the incomparable album 'The Drift'. Later that year, Scott was commissioned by London's South Bank Centre to write music for a contemporary dance piece. He immediately started work, and the completed score was recorded in the Spring of '07.

Entitled 'And Who Shall Go to the Ball and What Shall Go to the Ball?', the entirely instrumental composition is made up of four movements with a total running time of 25 minutes.

Scott has this to say about the music: "Apart from a slow movement given over to solitude, the music is full of edgy and staccato shapes or cuts, reflecting how we cut up the world around us as a consequence of the shape of our bodies. How much of a body does an intelligence need to be potentially socialised in an age of ever-developing AI? This is but one of many questions that informed the approach to the project."

When the music was completed, it was given to choreographer Rafael Bonachela and a dance company called Candoco, whose ranks include both able-bodied and disabled dancers. With production and lighting design also influenced by Scott's approach to the project, the first public performance took place at the Contact Theatre in Manchester in April. Since then, the company have toured the piece around Europe to much acclaim, and in September they returned to the UK to perform at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.

4AD have made the music for 'And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball?' available as a limited edition release in deluxe packaging, which is the very version we are speaking of now. It will never be repressed. So, here we go… enjoy.

"Should we even be listening to this in isolation? …it'll be our little secret…" MusicOMH.com