
Welcome to the website of Swimmer One. We are from Edinburgh in Scotland and we make music, among other things. If you’d like semi-regular updates on what we’re up to, type your email under the subscribe box on this page. Or just click on the RSS feed link below.
If you’ve stumbled across this site by chance and don’t know who we are, begin your visit at our biog. Otherwise, here are the latest headlines. (Or, if you have time on your hands and want something longer to read, why not pay a visit to our blog?)
The new Swimmer One album, Dead Orchestras, will be released on 31 May 2010, and you can now pre-order the album from our distributor at www.cargorecords.co.uk/release/11215.
You can listen to/embed/share five songs from the album at www.swimmerone.co.uk/music. Feel free to !
Hamish has just done a remix of Love In The Time Of Ecstasy by the fantastic Withered Hand, which is available to download for 50p via SL Records. You can listen to it/embed it/share it via the player below or at the Hunterheck Facebook page - along with two other remixes for Astrid Williamson and our London friends Jonny Cola and the A-Grades.
The remix will appear on Withered Hand’s new single, No Cigarettes, released on 22 March on SL Records. You can catch Withered Hand on tour throughout March.
Withered Hand - Love In The Time Of Ecstasy (Hunterheck mix) by Hunterheck
What did you do on Valentine’s Day? We spent the morning poncing around Edinburgh with briefcases, flowers and other props, having our photo taken by Jannica Honey.
We’ve known Jannica a long time and she has photographed us on stage before (some of the pictures are on this website). We’ll be posting hi-res versions of the best shots from the new session on the Presspics page in the next few weeks. Thanks very much to the lovely people at the Rose Leaf in Leith for letting us take over the place on a Sunday morning.
The second Swimmer One album is now finished, and scheduled for release in May 2010. Watch this space for updates. You can listen to five songs from the album online now at our MySpace page and our Facebook page.
You can also read Andrew’s track by track guide to the album here.
If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you may already know that the Swimmer One song But My Heart Is Broken features in Spread, the first Hollywood movie by Scottish director David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Hallam Foe). The film stars Ashton Kutcher as an LA drifter who sleeps with older women for money. We soundtrack the moment of his emotional awakening, which we’re quite pleased about, even if the song fades out just before the best part. Update - the film now has a UK release date, 1 January. The reviews have been mixed, shall we say, but when we saw it at last year’s Edinburgh Film Festival we thought it was quite good.
We’re now in the final stages of mixing the new Swimmer One album. Expect a release date to be announced soon. Meanwhile, we’ve added three previously unreleased songs to the music page, all of which you can download for free. Enjoy.
Andrew and Laura are, for the second year running, taking a show to the Arches Live theatre festival, which takes place in Glasgow this September.
The last show, a small, experimental theatre installation, toured to Turin after its run at the Arches, and is currently being developed into a much bigger project by Laura’s company Highway Diner, with support from the National Theatre of Scotland.
This year’s show, You Are Not With Me, is another installation - a love story for an audience of two people at a time, preferably strangers. It’ll be at Arches Live from 17-19 September. Given the nature of the piece, audience numbers will obviously be very limited, so book early.
Thanks to Lisa Rein for letting us use the image above. Its meaning will become clear when you see the show…
Long before Little Boots, La Roux, Lady Gaga and the like were making female-fronted synthpop The Sound of 2009, Hamish was quietly transforming a song by our friend, folky singer-songwriter Astrid Williamson, into an electropop anthem. Now, just in time for us to be wrongly accused of cashing in, it’s finished. You can listen to it online at his Hunterheck page, along with his equally fine remix for London band Jonny Cola and the A-Grades.
Daniel Warren, who has made five films with Swimmer One as well as designing all our sleeve art to date, has made a new film to mark the 40th anniversary of Scottish Ballet. Called Mercury, it is built from extreme slow motion footage of dancers from the company, and is the centrepiece of Scottish Ballet’s anniversary exhibition this autumn. You can see it at Tramway, Glasgow, 1-30 September, and Eden Court, Inverness, 19-30 October. Click on the link above to watch an extract.
To watch Daniel’s previous film for Scottish Ballet, Public:Private (featuring music by Hamish from Swimmer One), click on READ MORE, below.
Movie news. If you’re going to see Spread at the Edinburgh International Film Festival next week, listen out for the Swimmer One song But My Heart is Broken (from our album The Regional Variations), which features in the movie.
Spread is directed by David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Hallam Foe, The Last Great Wilderness) and stars Ashton Kutcher as an American Gigolo-type figure who seduces older women to pay the rent. It’s showing on 22 and 24 June. If you can’t make it to Edinburgh, the film should be in cinemas everywhere else later in the year.
You can read more about the film here.