Vocalist, poet and photographer, Paula Rae Gibson releases her latest album, “I Found You Eating Colours” via a new outlet, the art magazine Unvaeled, which is adding a music label to its portfolio. Rob Adams reports.

Paula Rae Gibson is an ideal partner for an art magazine branching out into record label ownership.

A prolific artist who is renowned for her photography as well as her lyrical poetry and ethereal vocal work, Gibson is releasing a new album, I Found You Eating Colours through Unvaeled.

Unvæled represents, showcases, and provides a platform for emerging, unique, and adept artists, musicians and writers and has recently started releasing music through Bandcamp.

Recorded with trumpeter, electronic musician and recording engineer Alex Bonney and featuring a bonus track with pianist Matthew Bourne, I Found You Eating Colours is the latest in a series of albums that have seen Gibson working with musicians including Will Gregory, of electronic music duo Goldfrapp, guitarist Rob Luft and pianists Ivo Neame and Kit Downes and recording for labels including 33 Jazz and Babel.

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“Unvaeled have featured me before and I think because I’m a photographer and there’s always a visual aspect to my music – videos are integral to what I do – I fit into how the magazine sees itself moving forward,” says Gibson.

Gibson is an instinctive poet and vocalist. She wrote the seven spoken word tracks on I Found You Eating Colours in her head before beginning work with Alex Bonney. 

“I write the lyrics and let them sit for a while to make sure I’m saying what it is that I want to express,” she says. “I like to surprise myself, so there’s no pre-planning, and when it comes to recording, everything is done in one take. There’s no editing.”

She has been fortunate, she says, to find musicians like Bonney, who – as with her previous co-creators – responded to her words with exactly the moods and colours she was seeking.  

“He’s very sensitive,” says Gibson. “I didn’t have to tell him anything. He knew when to add trumpet or a particular sound just from listening to the words. I had a similar experience with Kit Downes, with whom I made three albums. I love when you have that experience because for me it makes the end result sound immediate, so although what I do might not be conventional jazz, it has that essential jazz quality of happening in the moment.”

Early reviews have described I Found You Eating Colours as projecting a dark dystopian vision and have cited the more left-field work of Kate Bush, P J Harvey and Cyndi Lauper as reference points.

“I think I approach music the way I approach photography,” says Gibson. “When I began creating music I probably had more of the jazz tradition in my style but now, although it’s more abstract, it comes together with the videos and choreography to tell a story. I don’t always know what that story is going to be when I start out but through working with musicians and dancers, who are wonderful interpreters of words and sounds, it coalesces into a narrative.”

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LINKS: I Found You Eating Colours on Bandcamp

Paula Rae Gibson’s website