For every superstar who tours on a luxury tour bus, there are hundreds whose love of performing drives them to overcome challenges to put a tour together. Weeks in ratty vans, gas station showers, and laundromats. In case of British electronic artist Chad Valley (not to be confused with the UK toy brand by the same name) he spent a year working a day job mixing paint to get the funds for his current tour together.
That tour will bring him to First Avenue’s 7th Street Entry on 3/1 with support from New York state’s Computer Magic. Tickets are still available HERE
A product of Oxford’s prolific creative community, Chad Valley has a catalogue that spans three studio releases – 2010’s self-titled debut EP, 2011’s Equatorial Ultravox, and the 2013 LP, Young Hunger. Now, two years later, Chad Valley’s Hugo Manuel is back with his sophomore album, Entirely New Blue. The record is an exploration in identify and a return to the places that comfort us, especially when we return to them a different person.
The album was written between London, where he lived for years with his long-term girlfriend, and Oxford, the town that he came home to when their relationship ended. That painstaking transition is evident across the album’s nine tracks, perhaps mostly on slow-burners “Labasa” and “Seventeen”. The former of which is the namesake village in Fiji where his grandmother was born.
