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GRAND DUCHY (aka Violet Clark and Black Francis) Debut album, Petits Fours April 14th

GRAND DUCHY (aka Violet Clark and Black Francis) Debut album, Petits Fours April 14th

Tour dates forthcoming

Watch the exclusive video ‘Luxembourg Special Time’ directed by Grand Duchy at Pitchfork TV

Tuesday, April 14th, sees the release of ‘Petits Fours’, the debut album from Grand Duchy, aka Violet Clark and Black Francis. Featuring 9 tracks, ‘Petits Fours’ is the joint venture between Clark and Francis, rather than a solo Francis project, and contains driving bass lines, a healthy dose of synths and some excellent vocals from Clark, alongside Francis’s trademark guitar squalls.

A Letter of Intent Regarding the Creation
of the Debut Record “Petits Fours”
by
Violet Clark

My name is Violet Clark. I’m an art geek, a writer, and a self-taught musician. What gives me any sort of musical authority is simply my love of the thing. I love talking about music and I love creating it. I very much love the fact that I’m married to a musician.
You may know him as Black Francis. He is a complete and total character. And I imagine I probably am, too.

We are not one of those couples that says “yes, dear” to one another’s opinions. We agree on a lot of things, have similar interests and appreciations. But we disagree on a lot of things too. We have our own convictions.

We do however, have one pivotal, mutually agreed-upon outlook which brings richness to our shared life together: Life is Art. Or rather, to be alive is a creative act. And, whatever it is that you end up doing with your life, THAT is your art.

With that in mind, we have, over the past six years, fairly vigorously created much “art” together: children, a home, music, videos, business concepts — all kinds of stuff. Nothing we’ve accomplished, however, has been such a total coming-together of our Life = Art philosophy as “Petits Fours,” our debut record as the Grand Duchy.

A couple of years ago, after enjoying some studio collaborations together, we became compelled to toy with stripping down our operations, diving in and creating right there, in the studio — unrehearsed and without a plan. Sort of a musical equivalent of the automatic writing experiments of the Surrealists. We set before us a vigorous obstacle course by erecting the limitation that we would have to play all the instruments ourselves (in the end we had two cop-outs moments: see liner notes). We didn’t realize it at the time, but we were engaging one another in a game, like musical tag…a creative back and forth which allowed, in the end, each of our personalities to shine through intensely.

And as a product of two fairly staunch characters (to quote Little Edie in “Grey Gardens”), the end result can be best expressed as pairs of opposites: eclectic and consistent, raw and cooked, smooth and rough, punky and pop, guitar and synth, he and she.

So…welcome to our world. Can you stay for dessert?

“Petits Fours” comes out on April 14th in North America.

Available on CD and as a digital album, the full tracklisting is as follows :

1. Come On Over To My House
2. Lovesick
3. Fort Wayne
4. Seeing Stars
5. Black Suit
6. The Long Song
7. Break The Angels
8. Ermesinde
9. Volcano!