The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Spring Music Grant to Austin Hughes to help complete his first solo album/release “The Shipwreck Hymnal”. Up until now, Hughes has primarily released material in a band context (M Shanghai, VPN), yet his latest project has him teaming up with multiple Grammy award-winning producer/engineer/composer Damon Whittemore (Christian McBride, Béla Fleck, Deerhoof) for an indie folktronica album.  

Austin Hughes is an indie folk/rock singer-songwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Harlem, NY.  His songs are known for their arresting melodies, provocative lyrical imagery, unorthodox harmony and elysian atmospheres.  Hughes’s original songs have been featured in films, television and audio books. His 2016 song Bedlam is the theme song for the A&E hit television series Escaping Polygamy.  

With “The Shipwreck Hymnal”, Hughes and Whittemore create songs and soundscapes that reflect 21st century life; where to be enveloped in digital frequencies is less a dystopian isolation and more the new humanistic expression.  Banjos collide with analog synthesizers, mandolins with electronica and field recordings, voices range from starkly intimate to otherworldly.  Despite its thoroughly contemporary vision, the project revels in the imperfect qualities of authentic, unvarnished performances, to reflect the broken and beautifully flawed world we live in.  

At first listen, the songs can tilt dark; with images of shipwrecks and sea monsters, trespassers and addicted angels, absentee gods and delusional AI.  The tunes ultimately find their optimism through Hughes’s uplifting harmonies and Whittemore’s masterful use of texture that swing between trance and transcendence.  Hughes’s partner, filmmaker/artist/songwriter Tati Nguyen adds a warm lilt with her unique vocal counterpoint. Nguyen is heading up a parallel visual story for the music via films and animations, while Whittemore will create an immersive surround sound experience of the album for site-specific installations.

Hughes mentions the moment that the seeds of “The Shipwreck Hymnal” were sown": “In 2001, two albums and live concerts that completely blew me away were Gillian Welch’s Time the Revelator and Radiohead’s Amnesiac. The two expressions can seem diametrically opposed, yet I yearned to be in a project that had a foot in each of these worlds: the starkly intimate and the experimental abstract. The tangible and the imagined. The past and the future.”  The ‘ship’ in the Shipwreck Hymnal is an old wooden ship as much as it is a spaceship, with a nod to the rich traditions of American music, and an adventurous spirit to go somewhere uncharted.  

“The Shipwreck Hymnal” is slated for release in April, 2022. 

Please visit Austin’s Instagram and his website or M Shanghai’s website for more information.