Matthew Halsall releases ‘Oneness’, a mesmerising collection of archive recordings featuring three sessions of deep meditative spiritual-jazz. This deluxe edition comes in a triple vinyl set, cd and download and has been beautifully packaged and designed by the renowned Ian Anderson of The Designer’s Republic.

“I really believe in Oneness and I’ve always loved the term ‘greater than the sum of its parts’. I could make music on my own and live a fairly isolated antisocial life, but there’s something far more rewarding about creating things with others. And for me these sessions document the coming together of lots of different musicians in a wonderfully organic soulful way to make egoless music”.  — Matthew Halsall

The sessions that make up Oneness capture Halsall in the process of building a new band, reaching out to various musicians he’d discovered and admired on the Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds music scene. “I really liked this idea of bringing lots of musicians together from different backgrounds and was fascinated with how they would all react to each other and the tanpura drone box seemed to bring everyone together really well, it was kind of like a nice meditative icebreaker exercise for everyone to loosen up, before we got stuck into the more composed tunes I’d created, some of which ended up on the Sending My Love and Colour Yes albums”.  The album’s title, Oneness, speaks to both Halsall’s conviction that the planet should be shared equally with all of its inhabitants. That no human being or other inhabitant deserves to exist more than the other and that we can achieve far more together than against each other. And also importantly to what Halsall was aiming for musically:

For those who missed out on tickets to the first three basement sessions at YES in Manchester, we are delighted to announce that the next three are now on sale and available now on a first come first serve basis hereMatthew will also perform at the sensational space of EartH Hall in Hackney, London on Sunday 20th October.