My Brightest Diamond – This is my Hand (2014)

My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden was working on an audio-visual collaboration, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Belper’s six-hour long cine-opera, River of Fundament, set in the automobile factories of latter-day Detroit. In the film, a high school-style marching band is seen in procession through the streets of Motor City and playing in its vast, echoing factory spaces.


This struck a chord in Shara, for whom the new album would be a purposeful readdressing of music-making on the most basic, tribal level. “In the States, the marching band is something that is done in school, so it still represents something inclusive, something anyone can learn,” Shara explains. “I loved the communal quality… the way drums and horns travel in large three-dimensional spaces.” But it also sparked a search for more personal meaning. “The genesis of the new album was looking at the changes that have happened in music over my career, and trying to reevaluate what [music] meant to me in the first place. What is the value of music?”