Today, drummer-composer Tom Skinner releases his second solo album Kaleidoscopic Visions on LP, CD, and digital download via Brownswood Recordings and International Anthem (available on streaming platforms on October 17). New single “The Maxim” — a ten-minute collaboration with Grammy Award-winning singer and bassist Meshell Ndegeocello — is out now alongside a dreamlike, personal video by acclaimed filmmaker Sam Blair, made from Skinner’s own family archive of Super 8 footage.

Listen to The Maxim ft Meshell Ndegeocello and purchase Kaleidoscopic Visions here.

“The Maxim” is a dubby, spacious meditation on life and death, delivered with a free-spirited grace. For Skinner, working with Meshell Ndegeocello — whom he first saw at Glastonbury as a teenager in 1994 — represents a full-circle moment, indicative of the indirect paths and inspirational detours that have shaped his life.

Tom Skinner on the new single & video, “The Maxim:”
“The Maxim is a 10-minute meditation on time. An incantation and exploration of human existence — addressing birth, life and death in one breath. It’s about standing in the middle of everything, looking back at where you’ve come from, then looking forward to where you might be headed and trying to make sense of it all. Working with Meshell on this song was born out of a meaningful friendship that has developed between us over the last few years. She has long been a great inspiration and influence of mine; someone I’ve aspired to ever since I first discovered her music as a teenager back in the ’90s, so having the opportunity to work together on this song feels like a full-circle moment and holds great significance to me. I’m so grateful to her in trusting me throughout this process.

I’m also incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with filmmaker Sam Blair on the video for The Maxim. Although we hadn’t met previously, we both spent much of our formative early years kicking about in the same neck of the woods and connected over our shared experience of traversing the daily grind of growing up in a metropolis like London. The film that he’s made to accompany the song is based around recovered family archive Super 8 footage that my grandfather had shot around the UK and California in the ’60s and ’70s.”

Filmmaker Sam Blair on the video:
“The video for The Maxim is the product of a dialogue between Tom and I, that took place over a number of months. Rather than a discussion around a music video concept, it was really a conversation about where Tom was at in his life when he was making this album—both as an artist and a person—and a chance for him to reflect on the themes and emotions that had emerged in the music. There was a sense of Tom crossing a personal and musical threshold with this album, which resulted in fragments of his life being reflected back at him. This led us to think about a video that should have that intimate and handmade quality, and carry with it that existential weight. The Maxim itself is so ambitious and sweeping as a piece of music, so delicate and defiant and rich with meaning—I didn’t dare to make a literal interpretation of it, but instead we made a video that’s in a kind of parallel dance with the track.

The exploration and evocation of time is central to the piece. Both Tom’s sense of time as a musician, where rhythm is something personal and connected to nature, and the broader sweep of time through generations—particularly of being in a kind of vertiginous middle-ground between your parents and your children. Looking backward and forward at the same time in a way that is dizzying. The video is a very personal expression of that experience, explored through Tom’s family Super 8 archive, which we merged with contemporary material we shot in London. The organic, fleeting nature of Super 8 is at the core of it, carrying with it a sense of the personal and the temporal, which casts us back and forth in time through the city that informs so much of Tom’s personal and musical outlook, and then beyond.”

Watch the video for “The Maxim” feat Meshell Ndegeocello, by filmmaker Sam Blair, here.

Kaleidoscopic Visions showcases Skinner drawing together the many threads of his career as one of the UK’s most versatile and free-thinking contemporary musicians. Performing and recording with Sons of Kemet, The Smile, David Byrne, Meshell Ndegeocello, Alabaster DePlume, Floating Points and Peter Zummo as well as a wide range of collaborations across London’s vibrant improvised and electronic scene, Skinner’s diverse touchpoints are brought together in an album of quiet power and profound truths, reflecting his journey so far and opening the road towards what is to come.

Where Skinner’s 2022 debut, Voices of Bishara, drew inspiration from Abdul Wadud’s 1978 cello masterpiece By Myself, the new album, Kaleidoscopic Visions, shifts toward more personal, fully composed material. Brought to life by the intuitive improvisations of long-time bandmates Tom Herbert (acoustic bass), Robert Stillman (tenor & soprano saxophone), Chelsea Carmichael (tenor saxophone & flute), and Kareem Dayes (cello), the album also features high-profile collaborations with Meshell Ndegeocello, Portishead’s Adrian Utley, Contour, and Yaffra.

This should come as no surprise. On Kaleidoscopic Visions, one of London’s most vital musical figures gives us a sparkling glimpse of the multi-coloured lens through which his unique sound is now refracting.