DTx2, the brand new album from Blood Wine or Honey, looks ahead to an uncertain future while drawing deep on the band's past experiences and influences. Written and recorded during 2020-21, it welcomes a host of new co-conspirators from Hong Kong, the UK and the US.Jean Daval, aka Preservation (credits include Yasiin Bey fka Mos Def, MF Doom, RZA, GZA, Raekwon, KRS-One, Aesop Rock), provided truffle-hunted beats, synths and basses, which, when put through the BWoH mangle, emerged as 'Messenger'.Superstar and old friend of the band KT Tunstall came to work with BWoH after they contributed a DJ mix for her lockdown ‘KTRave’ on Instagram. ‘Attraction’ was the result. Wonky bass, found-bounce beats and Buddy Rich drums smashed out by Tim Weller (Marc Almond, Future Sound of London, Goldfrapp, The Chemical Brothers, David Axelrod) resulted in a bonkers production with passionate vocals and layers of harmony.'I Shall Rush Out As I Am' is a collaboration with legendary pop provocateur Paul Morley and Janice Lau of Hong Kong band David Boring. The track is based on the words and the spirit of sci-fi writer, satirist, literary critic and radical feminist Joanna Russ and took shape quickly, with tinges of A Certain Ratio and memories of Suicide, provoking Janice to an authentic scream-of-consciousness delivery.Multi-talented London singer, musician and composer Kamal (Neighbourhood Recordings) took time away from being the Next Big Thing to transform 'Testing Time’ with funk-edged keys. Zoë Brewster, a key figure in the extraordinary ’90s Hong Kong music scene, contributed vocals.Roughly divided, the album’s first set of songs make relatively short statements, punchily self-contained with common threads. The final four tracks, Testing Time, Embers, Embrasure and Echt Embrace disperse into flights of mantric fantasy, with quicksand time-signature shifts and key-changes emerging into a more introspective zone with a fervent pulse, a shift in energy: stamina over speed.“During These Difficult Times. A clause so commonplace it’s a sardonic refrain. The hard times become the norm; the sentiment is redundant. This album is a mode of expression in a tight space—Hong Kong. The city is a limited but not limiting zone, a small world encompassing an infinite Mandelbrot set of Ballardian high-rise and hidden activity. It’s not a ‘lockdown’ album. In Hong Kong we’ve never been truly locked down, but shut in; isolated in a wider sense, provoking us to look outside the 2-person bubble and enlist some unexpected collaborators. We discovered, fittingly, that ‘DTx2’ encodes all sorts of things: it’s a human enzyme, a protein coding gene; a make of Yamaha electronic drums from 1996; a model of underwater drone.
