WIRRAL musician Nick Power has revealed details of a new project which sees The Coral keyboardist release a new album this October.

Throat consists of Power, in collaboration with Mark McKowski, one half of Irish duo The Lost Brothers.

Recorded in the period of 2021 and 2024 between Omagh, Northern Ireland and Merseyside, Throat is a journey through McKowski and Power’s shared imaginations, at times reminiscent of the rumbling darkness of Nick Cave & Warren Ellis' movie scores; poetry readings held in the middle of stone circles just before dawn light; the bleaker moments of The Wicker Man soundtrack or spending time at a lock-in at a haunted folk club where the beer’s been spiked.

Power, who formed chart toppers The Coral in Hoylake during the late 1990s, said: "Mark and I have known each other since maybe 2001, when Mark was in a band called The Basement.

"Our bands were on the same label, Deltasonic. We’ve always sent songs back and forth to each other, always made each other laugh.

"Just before lockdown I think we were both at a kind of impasse in our creative lives and started to kick ideas back and forth between each other.

"One day Mark had been in the studio and had recorded something out of pure exasperation, I think.

"It ended up being the title track, Throat. He kind of sent it as if to say, ‘listen to this mad thing I did. ’I thought it was the wildest thing I’d ever heard. It was so outside of anything happening that I knew I wanted to be a part of it.

"I’d recently been recording some poems into an old Dictaphone, so got some lyrics together quickly - about a loner on the peripheries of society, driving around a Multiplex at night, full of a feeling or desire that he can’t work out is rooted in good or evil. It seemed to fit the music. We both loved it and everything flowed from there."

It’s the sense of outsiderness that links Throat’s disparate parts: folk-horror, VHS video nasties, poetry, the natural world, hauntology, true crime, John Lurie films, teenage acid trips, twisted road songs. Throat is a way of giving a platform to this secret world, while almost moonlighting as a run-of-the-mill ‘album’.

Soon after the title track was complete, Mark began recording and sending more music to Power, who’d write words while driving around Merseyside at night.

Mckowski said: "There was no deadline. We weren’t racing against the clock to make an album. We were just sending stuff back and forth for the pure fun of it and before we knew it we’d created a monster.

"We never sculpted a bunch of songs then recorded them in the normal way. This is just the music that fell out when we pressed the record button, stream of consciousness style.

"Whatever was recorded was the song. Straight from brain to tape. I sent the tracks to Nick, mostly just because he’s about the only person I knew who would get it, and he did, instantly. When he sent his first Dictaphone vocal back to me I must have listened to it on repeat for five days straight. I went a bit insane.’"

As the tracks began taking shape a pattern emerged, and with it, certain rules. All recordings go down in the first take. Mistakes stay in. Only play what’s to hand, even if it’s a tin pot. It’s within these limitations that Throat blossomed - eschewing traditional song structures for discordant instrumental breaks, passages of spoken word, the sound of footsteps on a wooden staircase.

McKowski explains: "I’m not that excited about writing nice little folk songs at the moment. I have a million of those gathering dust in a drawer. When I sit down with a guitar or an instrument nowadays, Throat is what comes out.’

Power said:‘ "If we thought a backing track or set of words were great but too traditional, they got binned. We found out that the Dictaphone I was singing into - the tape moved at a different speed to the tape the music was recorded on, so a lot of the vocals move in and out of time. But however they fit on the first pass was the way they went down.

"There are ‘wrong ’moments all over the album: periods of silence that go on too long, bum notes, phone recordings. We kind of fought to keep them. I didn’t realise how hard it was to get something as wrong as this is over the line. Mastering engineers couldn’t get their head around it. They kept wanting to correct it."

"We thought we’d made something unlistenable in places, but when we showed it to people, they liked it… it resonated," said McKowski.

In fitting with the unexpected, McKowski hoodwinked Texan singer Jolie Holland to make a cameo on late track ‘Return Of Ghillie Man’.

He said: ‘"Jolie and I were on a small Irish tour together and we had a couple days off. We were in my house recording something, and then I played her one of the tracks from this album. I think it triggered something in her, and she started playing this drone fiddle along with a Moog synth, and we built onto the track from that. It was perfect."

Throughout the album and the album’s artwork, the theme of the Ghillie Man recurs.

Power said: "I was listening to the album after we’d finished it. I had this weird image of someone in a Ghillie suit, which is a kind of extreme camouflage wear, used for hunting.

"We fell on this idea that the Ghillie Man was an ancient being we’d summoned into the present through the Throat album. He’s been asleep for a long time. He’s hungry. We feel it’s our job to feed him. Then, when Ghillie Man is satisfied, he’ll regurgitate the spirit of our music back into the world, in one gigantic supernatural burp".

‘Throat’ by Nick Power and Mark McKowski is out on October 4 on Deltasonic. 

Available in store and from www.av8records.co.uk   Vinyl and cds come with signed artwork