Fiona Brice shares mesmerising video directed by Rankin to announce upcoming album
Fiona Brice is a multi-instrumentalist, orchestral arranger and composer who has drawn on her abundance of talent to create her latest record. “I wanted to make a record that was meditative, compassionate, calm and reflective, as a reaction to the increasingly noisy, aggressive and polemic tone of our daily environment,” says Brice.
“A lot of songs out there have an enormous number of words – just like people are talking all the time on social media. So, I wanted to break things down to the emotional core. Historically too, mantras in the yogi tradition of repetition soothe the mind and body.”
Brice has drawn on all her experience gained working with the likes of John Grant, Anna Calvi, Jarvis Cocker, Kanye West, Beyoncé, Katherine Jenkins, and the BBC Concert. She toured with Placebo for ten years, and more recently Elbow, so to say Brice is in-demand is an understatement. Her debut album Postcards From, a minimalist, filmic set of instrumentals, was released in 2016. After two classical projects (String Quartet No.1 in 2018 and the lockdown-inspired Piano Preludes in 2022). And You Know I Care is a wide-ranging, ruminating work, which showcases Brice’s voice, lyrics and choral arrangements.
Renowned photographer Rankin is another friend (Brice initially featured in his famous Raw Nudes exhibition). She asked him to direct a video for the lead single and title track after seeing his powerful portrait series, Flora, which juxtaposed flowers and flames. Brice says: “I found Rankin’s series resonated with the music, though he’d only done stills: a video was my suggestion.” The visuals’ flickering beauty combines with the music’s ebb and flow, recalling video artist Bill Viola’s stunning slow-motion work. “I wanted something that could be shown in an art gallery,” says Brice. “It’s an installation as much as a video.”
Brice chose one of Rankin’s Flora images for the album cover. On the back, she wears a formal black classical concert dress, lying in a yoga position known as ‘constructive rest’. “It promotes calming, tension release and relaxing the sympathetic nervous system,” says Brice, who trained as a yoga teacher in 2017.
Watch the music video for And you know I care below and pre-order the album here.
