Beirut detail forthcoming album, A Study of Losses, commissioned by Swedish circus Kompani Giraff

Accompanying the album's announcement is new single “Guericke’s Unicorn” together with a video showcasing Kompani Giraff’s stunning choreography, shadow puppetry and stage design.

“Guericke’s unicorn is a supposed reconstruction of a fossil unicorn which was actually created from the bones of a bunch of different animals like the woolly mammoth and a narwhal. It’s worth looking up the image”, says Zach Condon. “I’ve always been fascinated by these kinds of bizarre chapters and odd side notes of history, and I wanted to reflect the unorthodox / eccentric madness of that ‘unicorn’ in a more playful song that is somewhat disjointed from the rest of the album. I think my music can have that disjointed / chaotic tendency in general, but with the whole album otherwise being somewhat uniformly baroque inspired, ‘Guericke’s Unicorn’ really makes for an outlier on this record, having its origin in an old modular synth experiment of mine.”

As a free interpretation of Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, the novel by German author Judith Schalansky, A Study of Losses journeys through eleven songs and seven extended instrumental themes, named after the lunar seas and inspired by the chilling tale of a man obsessed with archiving all of humanity’s lost thoughts and creations. Like Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, A Study of Losses finds Condon writing about disappearance, preservation and the impermanence of everything known to us – extinct animal species, lost architectural and literary treasures, the process of aging and other abstract concepts.

Additionally, with Beirut’s O2 Academy Brixton show on 8 May having long-since sold out, a second London performance has been added at the Troxy on 9 May.

Tracklist:

1. Disappearances and Losses
2. Forest Encyclopedia
3. Oceanus Procellarum
4. Villa Sacchetti
5. Mare Crisium
6. Garbo’s Face
7. Mare Imbrium
8. Tuanaki Atoll
9. Mare Serenitatis
10. Guericke’s Unicorn
11. Mare Humorum
12. Sappho’s Poems
13. Ghost Train
14. Caspian Tiger
15. Mani’s 7 Books
16. Moon Voyager
17. Mare Nectaris
18. Mare Tranquillitatis