I still don’t completely understand how the April release of Mariner—the collaboration LP between Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas—eluded Decibel coverage. Maybe we just had a bad taste in our mouth from past metallic artist collab recordings like Neurosis and Jarboe and Ozzy and Lita Ford. Or maybe we just get too much shit sent to our office.
Anyway, I’m sure many of you didn’t fuck this up like we did. But if you slept on Mariner, we’ve got the video premiere of album centerpiece “Chevron” below. And we as a few Euro tour dates where CoL and Xmas will perform the record live. Johannes Persson tells Decibel how and why that came to be.
“Mariner was never supposed to be played live. It was under this premise that we started working together with Julie over two years ago. The goal was to release the album, which was hard enough considering that we live on two sides of the gigantic Atlantic ocean. But if there’s one thing that life has taught me, it’s that you should never say never – however unlikely an event seems to be. Usually unlikely events are bad things that happen despite all precautions but in this case… well, let’s just say that the outcome is yet to be decided. The stars have aligned perfectly and I am going to have to take back what I’ve repeated in numerous interviews this past year: that Mariner will not be played live, because it will. We have managed to sync our schedules and in November we will do a select few shows in Europe. Note that we will only play Mariner from start to finish. There will be five Cult of Luna & Julie Christmas shows in Europe, nothing more and nothing less. There are no plans to perform the album live again.”
Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas Tour dates:
11/2/2016 – Debaser Medis – Stockholm, SW
11/03/2016 Les Docks – Lausanne, CH
11/04/2016 De Kreun – Kortrijk, BE
11/05/2016 Damnation Festival – Leeds, UK
11/06/2016 Lera Odos – Athens, GR
Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas’s Mariner is available from Indie Recordings now.
