We Stand Divided
Palm Skin Productions

‘We Stand, Divided’ is the latest offering from Palm Skin Productions, AKA versatile musician and producer Simon Richmond (whose CV includes Mo’ Wax, Depeche Mode, REM, Pulp, Neneh Cherry, and The Bays), taken from his  new album ‘A Swarm In July’.

‘A Swarm In July’, released Friday 18th August, is a proverbial inspired concept record that offers an alternative set of hacked proverbs to mirror the movement of the music and its path from ambience to rhythm, from harmony to noise, from its closed-in intimacies to its soaring expansions. The album looks at what happens when you choose to shift the crop – when you find the story within the story. As Simon eloquently puts it: “A proverb. A phrase. A saying. A Say-ing – the performance of that which has been said. A maxim. A truism. True-ism – the ideology or the myth of truth? Whose truth? Who puts you in the picture? What is the crop, the edit? When can you trust a truism in the world of deep fake? If every story is dependent on its beginning and end, how many stories are there, dormant, within the prescribed boundaries? Pre-Scribed – already written – typeset for us.” 

‘We Stand, Divided’ is a take on “Together we stand, divided we fall”,  Simon contextualises the track through the prism of the toxic UK immigration debate, fuelled by the fires of the Brexit referendum: “So many are taught to fear difference, to harden community into a dividing wall, but our strength is in our beautiful variation. Puppets stand in homogenous herds, moulded to a single malleable unit. We stand in celebratory disarray.”