A new and gorgeous chapter from Courtney Barnett is officially out today with the release of her instrumental album End Of The Day. Comprised of 17 improvisations that were originally recorded in 2021 as part of the score to the film Anonymous Club, Barnett returned to these tracks a year later, remixing, re-ordering and reframing them into a seamless meditative collage. Previously, Barnett released the first three tracks of the album. “Start Somewhere”, “Life Balance” and “First Slow”.
Barnett also collaborated with filmmaker Claire Vogel to create an album-length visual accompaniment to End Of The Day. Inspired by the album’s artwork (an image of distant figures in blue raincoats climbing a hill near Niagara Falls) their imagery matches the record in its unfussy beauty and intimacy.
To celebrate the songs being out into the world, Barnett will play a series of now sold out intimate shows across the US. Each show will be split in two sets with the first set will see Barnett and collaborator Stella Mozgawa performing instrumental songs and improvisations from the soundtrack, the second will see Barnett performing songs and singing from her incomparable back-catalog.
In May of 2021, Courtney Barnett and collaborator/producer Stella Mozgawa had just handed in the final masters for Barnett’s third album Things Take Time, Take Time when they met up with filmmaker Danny Cohen in a Melbourne studio. Barnett had been experimenting with new gear, making meditative long-form pieces for an audience of one. Mozgawa had just bought an Oberheim OB6 which became the center-piece of her setup, feeding sounds through a tape echo. And for his part, Cohen had a near-finished documentary, Anonymous Club, a candid portrayal of the travails and hard-fought personal triumphs of Barnett’s ascent to international indie rock adulation. Now, he just needed a score.
As Cohen played the final edit of his film that day, Barnett and Mozgawa improvised with one guiding principle—nothing too maudlin, obvious, or instructive, nothing to tell the future audience how they should be feeling about Barnett’s life onscreen. Anonymous Club offers up a plethora of Barnett’s music, documenting her charged live sets and her start-and-stop-and-search songwriting process. The pieces she and Mozgawa made that day, though, float around the edges of the finished scenes, coloring the proceedings much like the grain of Cohen’s 16mm film. Really, one could watch Anonymous Club and never know that Barnett made extra music for it.
A year passed and Barnett found she liked listening to what they had made in Melbourne, putting it on and existing within its reflective gaze. Might this be more than the instrumental music of a film? She began sorting through the panoply of little instrumentals like amoebic puzzle pieces, figuring out how she might adjust them ever so slightly until they fit together into a complete and compelling picture. Almost everything on the result of that work—a seamless series of 17 instrumental improvisations she now calls End of the Day —stems from the film.
Courtney Barnett – End Of The Day
Start Somewhere
Life Balance
First Slow
A to B
(Electricity)
Two Circles Reflecting
End Of The Day
Floating Down
Spring Ascends
Intro
B to C
Like Water
Gold Room
Sun Through
River
Get On With It
Eternity Repeat
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