Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan has a new project called Sexwitch (great name), with Dan Carey and TOY. The self-titled album, which you can stream below, is a covers collection of 1970s psych and folk songs, from Morocco, Thailand and Iran. Khan and crew found the original tracks on their travels, then translated the songs into English and recorded the album live in a single session. Khan told Pitchfork about the translation process…
“We looked for translations but there weren’t very many at all, so my manager and lovely friends of ours who know Iranian people, who know Thai people, we sent out an email across friends and asked them to send back translations. Some people sent back differing translations. People’s interpretation of poetry is really interesting—sometimes you translate something really word-for-word, and other people put it into a more poetic context. I did a really quick, instinctive pulling out and underlining of things I liked, and started mixing them together to create these songs.”
Khan also discussed with Pitchfork how they settled on the name Sexwitch…
“It came into my head because we were trying to look up beautiful Moroccan names, or names of stars or goddesses, but I thought, god, this is getting so fucking cliché, I can’t deal with this. I just thought, let’s just say what it is. When we were recording it, every time I’d do funny sex noises, me and Dan said, we’re being sexy witches. It’s a bit tongue in cheek, we’re not trying to be super cool, but I think it’s memorable. There is something very magical and dark and feminine archetypal force about it. Also, when I was singing—and this sounds ridiculous—it did feel like I was channeling some sort of ancestral feelings about witches. I kept feeling witch spirits and people that had been burned and repressed and pushed down. I just felt like I’d opened a portal—you know in Ghost, where all these dark spirits come out of the grates in the floor? I felt like something had been opened. So there is definitely a witch thing, but not because it’s now cool to be witchy and mystical, but generally about that sort of ancient feminine archetype. And also not just the feminine, not just being a woman, but there’s a quote we put in the press release because I loved it so much: about the feminine aspects in men and women, and men and women being connected to nature, power, sexuality, rebirth, regeneration. I feel like that’s in the name as well.”
Sexwitch is out September 25 on The Echo Label Limited. Pre-order it via Apple Music.