Ezra Feinberg returns with the graceful “Acquainted with the Night”

The first song from his second LP, Recumbent Speech.

May 13, 2020

There was an eight-year gap between Ezra Feinberg's final album with the psychedelic-leaning rock band Citay and his debut solo album, Pentimento and Others, in 2018. The time between those records changed Feinberg as a person: he left San Francisco for Brooklyn, started working as a psychiatrist, and lost one of his early mentors to cancer. And, in turn, his approach to music changed. Pentimento and Others was completely unlike anything that Feinberg had written or played on before, an ambient record built around meditative, looping acoustic guitars. It was as intricately designed as a perfect paper airplane, and just as graceful when it took off.

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Today Feinberg is announcing his second album, Recumbent Speech — due out on June 26 via Related States — and premiering its first single, "Acquainted with the Night." Again the song builds from Feinberg's simple acoustic guitar loops, introducing synths, dizzy guitar lines, and layered flutes courtesy of the acclaimed multi-instrumentalist Robbie Lee.

"'Acquainted with the Night' is a lament," Feinberg wrote in an email to The FADER. "Written during one of the many devastating spectacles of injustice under our current regime, it's about all that we've lost. I hope that it is also a balm, with healing properties in sound that might make us feel closer, even at a distance."

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Listen to "Acquainted with the Night" at the top of the page.

Thumbnail photo: Alex Phillipe Cohen via Riot Act.

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Ezra Feinberg returns with the graceful “Acquainted with the Night”