Victoria Hume - Radical Abundance (Lost Map) [Singer Songwriter]
Victoria Hume has been releasing music for over a decade, and has an inclination to write music about health and medicine based on interviews and workshops. She also does other ‘creative health’ work with the Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance, and as a Research Associate in the medical humanities at WiSER (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg).
Being as we're living the anthropocene & human extinction in the next century or two is a distinct possibility, it's surprising more artists aren't saying much about it. Well, not only is Victoria Hume not shying away from the subject, she's wrapped it up in eminently listenable, inventively produced & impeccably played alt-singer songwriter fashion via Lost Map & is offering astute solutions that touch on many of my pet topics: the demise of capitalism, mycelium, social movements, power structures, degrowth & the economy. The LP is edutainment at its finest, give her some love & maybe take an idea or two onboard?
Further Reading
An ambitious, inspiring and thought-provoking record unlike anything Lost Map has released before, Radical Abundance is the new album of absorbing atmospheric alt-folk songs from singer-songwriter Victoria Hume, all about the dying days of capitalism and what might emerge next. Made with support from Creative Scotland, it’s inspired by the book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel and based around interviews with Hickel as well as other activists and agitators seeking to steer the world away from a failing economic system that undermines all of our wellbeing. Radical Abundance is due for release on January 19, 2024 on limited-edition CD with handmade zine and digital platforms. The first single, the softly keening and mysterious ‘Oblivious Structures’ is available now as part of Lost Map’s PostMap Club subscription service and via digital platforms.
“This is about mycelial networks,” explains Victoria, of ‘Oblivious Structures’, “which symbolise the interrelatedness of nature, the cycle of life and death, but also reflect the nature of social movements, networks that exist despite and around and through existing power structures. It’s based partly on Jason Hickel’s writing and partly on my conversation with Daisy Moss, a freelance artist who also created the designs for the album and singles under her artist name anarchxart. She works with both badvertising, ‘a campaign to stop adverts and sponsorships fuelling the climate emergency’, and Rhyze, an Edinburgh-based collective who grow mushrooms on urban waste streams that would otherwise end up in landfills.”
