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Gloria de Oliveira & Dean Hurley

Gloria de Oliveira and Dean Hurley announce their new album, Oceans of Time, out September 16th on Sacred Bones, and share the lead single, “All Flowers in Time.”

Gloria de Oliveira and Dean Hurley announce their new album, Oceans of Time, out September 16th on Sacred Bones, and share the lead single, All Flowers in Time.”

Growing out of a musical pen-pal style correspondence that took place over the course of a year, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, de Oliveira and Hurley passed thoughts and music back and forth that would eventually form their collaborative album Oceans of Time, all without ever meeting or speaking. The result is a sonic tapestry of that exchange: woven from conceptual threads of the celestial within, mortality and the realm beyond the stars.

With its impressionistic synths, shimmering guitars, and ethereal sonics, Oceans of Time at moments recalls the foundational dream pop of 4AD acts and early 90’s New Age pop. Frequent David Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley sets the tonal and sonic backdrop of each track on the album, lending a layered ether that envelops, frames and spotlights de Oliveira’s vocals. The album feels especially attuned to the connections between the physical and transcendental realms, and like the best dream pop, has a way of making the veil between two worlds feel just a little bit thinner. Oceans of Time is a key that has the power to release its listener from the handcuffs of reality, however briefly.


The duo’s first single is sourced from a unique place: an unfinished Jeff Buckley & Elizabeth Fraser demo entitled All Flowers in Time Bend Toward the Sun.” The legacy and lore of the song is in itself a poetic cascade of time, cosmic links, loneliness, and the optimism of a love never realized. In 1983, Elizabeth Fraser would record a cover version of folk singer Tim Buckley’s 1967 Song to the Siren.” Released under the 4AD collective This Mortal Coil, the Fraser/Guthrie performance would launch the duo’s first charting success. A little more than a decade later, Fraser would find herself amidst a romantic relationship with Tim Buckley’s son Jeff shortly after her relationship with Cocteau Twins’ guitarist Robin Guthrie had come to an end. During the brief affair, the two would record the only demo for All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun.” Although the demo recording was never officially released, the song exists as a unique and profound musical artifact birthed from the lives of three cosmically entangled beings…a testament to the eternal nature of music that flows and connects across seas of time.


Speaking about the track, the pair said

“It’s not lost on us that this song is delicate, hallowed ground… the original recording wasn’t even intended to be heard. Yet its story and essence are what music is all about: real human sentiment poured out, touching the lives of others.

We were both moved by the song's optimism and our cover is simply a crater-like impression made from the bright-burning comet that is the original.”


The duo’s partnership is an effortless merge, with the steady presence of de Oliveira’s vocals endowing the record with its sense of potency. Throughout the album, there is an innate understanding of how a lyric across a chordal color can sharpen an emotional truth. Much like a sunbeam that pierces a spiderweb to reveal its intricacy, her lyric and melody are purposely aimed in order to illuminate the truths deep within one’s self…a process that ties us all to the universal. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, a professed influence, wrote about concepts of truth and faith in a way that illuminate the hidden depths of the soul amidst an individual’s earthly trials of experience. Much of this feeds into the album and threads its quilt of themes.


Photo by Beto Ruiz Alonso / Will Renton


Live shows

Nov 18 - Gloria de Oliveira show at Synästhesie 7

Nov 30 - Gloria de Oliveira show at Atelier 210 in Brussels, Belgium


Pre-order here


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