OUT NOW: Alabaster DePlume - Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue
(( photo by Sofia Lambrou ))
Today, London-based saxophonist, singer, songwriter, activist, orator, and poet-philosopher Alabaster DePlume releases his new EP of instrumentals, Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue, available now on all digital music platforms (following its April 18 release on Record Store Day exclusive vinyl LP).
Stream or purchase Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue here.
As an epilogue, Dear Children closes a four-part series that began in October 2024 with the release of DePlume’s poetry book Looking For My Value: Prologue to A Blade and digital EP Cremisan: Prologue to a Blade, followed by the critically-acclaimed album A Blade Because a Blade is Whole in March 2025.
Portraits of Palestine
Film by Skyler Carrico
Dear Children also arrives today alongside Portraits of Palestine, a 16mm film by Skyler Carrico featuring DePlume’s track “Honeycomb,” taken from the Cremisan EP.
Carrico says of the film: “In the spring of 2024, Alabaster and I both found ourselves in the occupied West Bank — he to undergo an artist residency which would lead to the creation of ‘Honeycomb’, and I to create visual art on 16mm film in collaboration with a youth center in a refugee camp. While our paths never crossed in Palestine, our work converges in this piece — a project which began without a clear sense of direction for music until it found its home in the sounds Alabaster happened to be recording during the very same period, so very nearby.”
DePlume says: “Skyler was driven by nothing more than the desire to deliver these children’s faces to you. The ideal piece of “content” is that which already wanted to happen, in the first place. Our feelings and instincts too, exist around this issue already - you can feel them now as you read this. It is my job to get out of the way and let you have them.”
(Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue art by Hassan Jawad Abudeia, installation and photo by Rich Jones)
DePlume recorded Dear Children during the middle of his March 2025 US tour, after weeks of playing shows with bassist Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Tcheser Holmes, performing music from his critically acclaimed album A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole (released March 2025). The trio’s onstage rapport was so immediate and strong that, on an off day in Brooklyn, DePlume chose to capture that connection, recording this collection of instrumental pieces shaped by the experience of performing, sharing, and improvising off the music of A Blade for audiences across the US.
Speaking about Dear Children, DePlume says: “Meeting with you all at the shows I sensed that you felt voiceless, on this ethical issue that also spelled out what we’re seeing today, in the form of ICE. That experience with you is etched into me, like graffiti or a poster on the wall. It’s my job to deliver your voice, and that’s what this record is. And to take action. That urgency compelled me to record then. And now here we are. As we said, this world is awakening to the reality it was already living.”
Listen to “Glass” and presave Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue here.
On April 18, Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue was released on a Record Store Day exclusive vinyl LP that also contains DePlume’s 2024 EP Cremisan: Prologue to A Blade.
The two EPs contained on the vinyl release serve as bookends (literally a “prologue” and an “epilogue") for A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole; and as with almost everything that DePlume has put forth in recent years, the connection of both works to Palestine is deep. The Cremisan EP itself was recorded in Palestine. Dear Children incorporates field recordings and samples of children playing and of normal life in the West Bank, and its cover art depicts wheat paste posters of a drawing made by a 13-year-old boy from Gaza (used with permission). The inscription on the cover art says, in Arabic, “Dedicated to the mother of the martyr/witness Obaida Ahmed al-Qiram. May you rest in peace. From your student, the artist, Hasan Jawad Abudayyeh.”
More info about the Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew / Cremisan vinyl LP via Record Store Day here.
LIVE DATES
DePlume will be performing a live score to the cult film Time of the Heathen in Portugal at the Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival and in Gent, Belgium at the 2026 edition of Videodroom during the International Film Festival of Gent. He’ll also be returning to the US to headline the first day of Sound and Gravity festival in Chicago.
(( photo by Alexander Massek ))
...about Alabaster DePlume...
Alabaster DePlume often asks a simple question: what do people need? In his work, at his shows, in his collaborations, the Mancunian singer-saxophonist and poet-philosopher poses this to the people around him. What are people looking for? In recent years, the same reply kept coming up: healing, healing, people need healing. But why, and what does it mean to heal, especially in a world where the very idea is often commodified and sold as a luxury? If people were coming to his music for something so mysterious, he ought to figure it out. Maybe he ought to try some healing himself.
“For a long time, I've always tried to give responsibility for my value to someone else,” DePlume said on a recent phone call. It seemed he’d become so caught up in the work of forging connections, and thinking about the effects of his work on others, that he’d lost a sense of himself. “I was working on that,” he explained.
This experiment in healing included slowing down, reading, reflecting, and even taking up the practice of jiu-jitsu. DePlume wrote poetry, too, including the book Looking For My Value: A Prologue to A Blade, seventy pages of verse rooted in its title’s great search, in finding strength of self within a community, alongside meditations on the paradox of the blade. “The blade, that divides, is whole,” he writes in the introduction. “Healing is the forming of a whole, and a whole is singular, more itself, as in more one, as in more alone.” A blade could be used to attack, to shave, to sever, but it could also be used to cut oneself loose — in the process of getting free.
“What's the opposite of sleep? It’s trying to sleep,” he says. “And so what's the opposite of looking for my value? It is knowing my value. It simply is there. My dignity is there. I don't need anyone else to know my dignity, or me, to know it. I know it first. I can't seek it from another. I stand for it.”
Selections from the poetry book ultimately became the lyrics across half of the tracks on A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole, DePlume’s latest full-length work: eleven songs of agency and survival and presence; of confronting life’s pains rather than trying to avoid them; of banishing escapism. In sum, it documents his learning of the fact that dignity and self-determination are prerequisites for becoming whole, which is to say, for healing. If a blade were broken it would not serve its purpose; it must be unbroken, it must be whole, to be of use.
In the Alabaster DePlume songbook, the celestial ease of his instrumental tracks can sometimes feel like a trojan horse for a voice that is disarmingly honest about the heaviness of existence.
Also available
Alabaster DePlume
A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole
“an album of fighting songs with healing sounds.” -The Quietus
"some of Fairbairn’s most powerful work to date." -now then
“Alabaster DePlume is unlike any artist of today.” -glide
“It’s a rare gift to make an instrument speak, rarer to make it communicate such a vital truth…” -Pitchfork
"Stunning...you can’t argue with DePlume’s outstanding melodies." -The Guardian
