This has been a busy year for Francis Harris’ label Kingdoms, with five releases jammed into 2018. 

The label, which Harris describes as a platform for the more diverse end of his musical tastes, taking in everything from “club-infected jazz, contemporary composition, ambient and reissues of obscurities from across the musical spectrum”, had its full first year this year after launching in mid-2017, and now they’re celebrating with a compilation tape, 'Kingdoms I'.

The compilation opens with another Harris project, Aris Kindt, his shoegaze collaboration with Gabe Hedrick, taken from their 2017 LP 'Swann and Odette', and the dark, heavy lullaby of ‘Several Wolves’.

Out on Kingdoms on December 14th, 2018.
Check the compilation out here.

'Trivial Occupations' is the third LP released under the Kingdoms and Scissor and Thread founder’s own name - and continues in the traditions of those landmark records. Having scaled to heights within the club scene and released almost a hundred records under different monikers, Francis Harris embarked on an altogether more personal journey as a composer of intimate, atmospheric pieces removed from the dancefloor.

"After making two emotionally charged concept-driven albums in Leland and Minutes of Sleep, for at least a few years," says Harris, "I felt like I had nothing else to say musically in my solo work. I experienced a gap in my creative process and ultimately a phase of depression. I then began to deal more directly with the question of how concepts work their way into any musical work, especially if one is not necessarily adept at exploring them from a purely theoretical standpoint. How do you approach an album without a concept? Is it necessary to have a concept? This lead to all sorts of existential rabbit holes. So I decided to go back to the beginning, which was no beginning at all. It was more like living in a pure present. Just getting back to a love for making music on my own and with other people. I didn't put a timeline on it and figured it would be finished when I felt the time was right. Four years later my Trivial Occupations became an album."