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Ervin Munir Releases “When I Think”

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Ervin Munir

Ervin Munir releases “When I Think” and it is his third album. If you have not been paying attention to what this Norfolk songwriter has been quietly building, consider this your wake up call. Eleven tracks. No filler. No messing about.

Opening track “Lifeline” sets the tone immediately. There is piano work here that does not beg for your attention, it just takes it, and Ervin’s voice sits on top of it like he has been carrying these words around for years waiting for the right moment to let them out. Spoiler: the moment is now.

The record moves brilliantly. “Rainfall Memories” will get under your skin in the best possible way. “I Don’t Care” has a rocky bite to it that feels like a genuine surprise the first time it lands. “One Step Beyond” shifts direction again and somehow it all holds together. This is an album that knows exactly what it is doing even when it sounds like it is throwing the rulebook out.

The title track arrives like the centrepiece it clearly is, accompanied by an animated video that earns its existence rather than just being a box ticked. It is the kind of song that makes you stare out of a window for a while afterwards.

There is a heaviness behind all of this too, and it would feel wrong not to acknowledge it. The album is dedicated to Aeron Z Jones, Ervin’s long-term producer and one of his closest mates, who passed away recently. Aeron shaped the sound across Munir’s previous releases and his fingerprints are all over this one too. That kind of loss does something to a record. It makes it matter more. It makes the whole thing feel like it was written and recorded for keeps.

You can listen here.

We Speak Music

Michele Ducci teases new album with uplifting indie single ‘Woman Like You’

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Michele Ducci has unveiled the second single, ‘Woman Like You’, from his forthcoming album and animated film ‘Snail in the Clouds’.

‘Woman Like You’ pairs bright distorted electric guitar with an electronic drumbeat, adding in Ducci’s soulful vocals and a catchy uplifting chorus with Letizia Mandoleisi’s sweet vocal harmonies. A vintage organ pedalboard operated by Ducci simultaneously generates chords, bass and rhythm, like a one-man band. Shane Kennedy (Girl in the Year Above) joins in on guitar. Simon Milner (Is Tropical, Ysing) recorded and produced the track at his 4am Studios in London.

The album and film tell the story of a planet called ‘Snail’, inhabited by hybrids – primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans – who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music. There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the ark of melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.

The video for the single, created and animated by Ducci and Mandoleisi, delves further into the realm of planet ‘Snail’:

Says Ducci, “The ark of melodies, after various attempts, finally starts to work and fly in the planet Snail, while the shady Doc. Sub. and Agostos, with their platoon of soldiers made of foggy smoke, spy the miracle, planning to steal the ark for their evil and tyrannical purposes.


About the track, Michele says, I wrote this song for my love Letizia. Love seen from the mind is the sound we make. Sound is the love of matter.

We used a Technics synthesizer organ from a flea market. I tried to find a mood that was right for the song and I started using the bass of the pedal board together with the synth and the drums, and it was magical to hear the song reveal itself all coming from a single instrument. Leti was singing with me and we recorded everything live in one shot. Then we made Shane do the guitar flight, as if he came out of the window. The idea was to maintain disproportions, guitar thrust and synth drum thinness a la Haroumi Hosono, so as to create an estrangement, but naturally: it’s about how I listen, with close up something that captures me in its nuance as element of a larger orchestra somewhere. I’m glad we decided in the studio with Simon to use the layers of arrangement as the close-ups in the cinema; they look like strange enlargements that perch on parts of a mutated orchestra. I’m happy to come back with this love song at a time when everything seems to opt, even my labor in managing the flows of selfishness that have poured out on me while doing this album, for the sound of war. I’m here happy to be able to say that the sound of love always wins as did for me. Snail in the clouds is one of the most important works in my life and I am glad to start from pure love for this album that is my son.

The album and full-length film will be released on the 5th of June on Monotreme Records.

Michele and Letizia’s previous musical short film, ‘The Great Book of Nature’, is an official selection for the 2026 Venice Shorts Film Festival.

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