Ukraine Krug

Wolf Parade's Spencer Krug has announced new solo album Fading Graffiti which will be out April 16 via his own helpfully named label, Pronounced Kroog. The album takes songs that originated as piano ballads on Krug's Patreon in 2019 and recontextualizes them as indie rock. This is also Krug's first album under his own name, having previously worked under his Moonface solo guise and Sunset Rubdown. The first single is Fading Graffiti's title track, which is pretty terrific – swooning and odd, and maybe just a little like Destroyer's more guitar-centric records.

Born in Ukraine, Thomas de Hartmann (1885–1956), a student of both Arensky and Taneyev, achieved fame as a composer in Russia in the early 1900s, and his concert music was later played by some of the major musicians of the day, primarily in Paris. Since his death, he has been remembered mainly for his association with the Caucasian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, whom he met in 1916, and his output for the concert hall has fallen into obscurity. The four works receiving their first recordings here reveal a major late-Romantic voice, downstream from Tchaikovsky, contemporary with Rachmaninov, and alert to the discoveries of Stravinsky and Prokofiev.