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Pageant Smile

by Adam Znaidi

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1.
Holy Moon 02:49
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Drunk Dial 00:33
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about

London based Moroccan British multi-instrumentalist Adam Znaidi presents Holy Moon, alongside his debut EP Pageant Smile - a cosmic space ride through a technicolour wormhole of psychedelic jazz rock.

Adam spent his early years listening to everything from Khaled to Frank Zappa, Umm Kulthum to Leonard Bernstein and every conceivable strange and beautiful sound in between. He is best known for co-forming experimental band The Physics House Band. He also plays bass for The Go! Team and has founded Wes Banderson - an orchestra that performs the scores from Wes Anderson movies. His previous projects have played KEXP, The Chris Gethard show in New York (where he witnessed a man have a cubic metre of hair salon cuttings dumped all over him before playing the show), as well as shows across the US, Japan, Europe and the UK.

On the process of creating the EP Adam says: “Holy Moon was pretty much the first track I wrote from specifically from the bass. I've always tended to focus on other instruments first, then think of the bass as a final element, but Holy Moon ended up emerging out of just playing with simple chords. Despite the craziness of the arrangement, the songs is actually really simple. There's an A section and a B section, and both chord progressions are really straight forward. I don't know where the words 'Holy Moon' came from, but I just started singing it as I was looping the main bass part, which ended up giving me the push to write more lyrics, and actually start singing.
The rest of the record spans musical ideas that I’ve been tinkering around with from 2014 to the present. Ideas that have always been lurking around and asking to be finished. Some of the parts actually still remain from when I was playing around with the early demos. All the bass, and the piano solos on Change Yourself Into Gold are first-takes that I found that I found just had so much more vibe and feel than anything I recorded when I tried to do it ‘properly’.”

“It was mostly recorded in my tiny studio in Brighton during lockdown. For Holy Moon, Barney Sage (Luo) recorded his drums at home in Bristol, with the two of us sharing ideas back and forth until we had a solid part worked out. Niels Broos (Jameszoo/Binkbeats) recorded his synth and Rhodes parts at his studio in Amsterdam, with a similar back and forth conversational process. The drums for Mouse Variations, Change Yourself Into Gold and And One More thing were recorded at Brighton Electric Studios by James Glazier and engineered by Mark Roberts. The sax was played by Miles Spilsbury, and recorded both at home and at Studio 93. Josh Trinnaman mixed it and Aneek Thapar mastered it. I wanted Holy Moon, and the Pageant Smile EP as a whole to be like the stargate sequence at the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Just a relentless multicoloured musical journey that's impossible to accurately describe, and leaves you thinking 'what the christ just happened?'.”

Adam also directed and edited the video for Holy Moon. “The video came from wanting to make something that felt like a ' Pop-Fashion' promo. Everything I do kind of has a tongue-in-cheek element to it, and I wanted to make create something that looked like I took myself way more seriously than I actually do, but also had a very wild and trippy element to it.”

credits

released August 13, 2021

All music written and produced by Adam Znaidi
Mixed by Josh Trinnaman
Mastered By Aneek

Musicians:

Adam Znaidi: Vox, Bass, Synths, Keys, Piano, FX

James Glazier: Drums on Mouse Variations, Change Yourself Into Gold, And One More thing.

Miles Spilsbury: Saxophone on Mouse Variations, Saxophone and keys on And One More Thing

Barney Sage: Drums on Holy Moon

Niels Broos: Rhodes and Moog solo on Holy Moon

Drums on Mouse Variations, Change Yourself Into Gold, And One More Thing recored by Mark Roberts at Brighton Electric.

Sax and keys on And One More Thing recorded by Tommy at Studio 95

Everyone else recorded their parts at home.

Cover design by Mihai Badic - Photography by Kamal Rasool

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about

Adam Znaidi London, UK

Adam Znaidi is a Moroccan British multi-instrumentalist based in London.

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