Bicep reveal new 'Isles' album track 'Sundial'

The track utilises a Bollywood sample and "grew from a faulty Jupiter 6 arp recording"

Bicep have shared ‘Sundial‘, a single taken from forthcoming Ninja Tune album ‘Isles’.

The new cut follows ‘Apricots’ and the Clara La San-featuring ‘Saku’.

“This is probably one of the simplest tracks on the album,” Bicep say. “It grew from a faulty Jupiter 6 arp recording. Our trigger isn’t working properly and the arp skips notes randomly. This was a small segment taken from a recording of Andy just playing the arp live whilst we were just trying to figure out what was going wrong. We actually loved what it had produced and wrote some chords around it, guided by the feeling of this recording.”

The pair have revealed a site tracking their use of all samples in ‘Isles’, and ‘Sundials’ contains a sample from ‘Jab Andhera Hota Hai’, taken from the 1973 Bollywood film Raja Rani, recorded by Asha Bhosle & Bhupinder Singh, and written by Anand Bakshi and R. D. Burman.

“In regards to the sampling, Indian music has always fascinated us since the blog days, discovering it was the possible birthplace of Acid house via Charanjit Singh’s Ten Ragas to a disco beat. Living in East London, Indian influence and music is everywhere and over the past few years we’ve both become huge fans of Bollywood film scores, particularly the female soprano performances. The haunting melancholic epicness really strikes a chord with both of us. We feel we can relate to how similar it is to the Irish folk we grew up around from the likes of the Clannad.”

Bicep’s ‘Apricots’ featured at number three in our 50 Best Tracks of 2020 list.

Listen to ‘Sundial’: