tendai | Biografie

 

Following the release of his intimate debut single ‘Not Around’ at the tail end of the Summer, today 21 year old singer, songwriter, producer and performer tendai returns with brand new music. His new single ‘Infinite Straight’ is another glimpse into the other-wordly sonic landscape of an artist creating a sound that seamlessly melds past and present influences.

On Infinite Straight we find tendai coming to terms with his own mortality, acting as a modern day bluesman at the crossroads with the long road of life ahead but with the constant presence of death on his heels. He writes;

“It’s about life and death in the sense that one might feel that you’re on this infinite road, but it can feel as if you’re being chased. Deaths going on all around you” Though the track was not explicitly written in response to the pandemic, tendai acknowledges that it was hard not to be influenced by the sheer amount of tragedy happening in the world ‘I wasn’t even conscious of that until i heard the song played back to me – when’s there’s so much happening in the world centering around death, be it George I Floyd, the pandemic, or even celebrities, it’s hard to ignore’

 

The track comes accompanied by a shiver-inducing video filmed in remote wilderness and directed by duo Ethan & Tom – it’s eroded landscape adding to the music’s deftly layered arrangements and candid poetics. 

 

 

tendai bio: tendai’s formative musical journey started at the age of seven when he wrote his first song at the request of his mother. Over the following fourteen years, the 21 year old singer, songwriter, producer and performer from Canning Town, east London has been building a unique musical universe. His music holds the blistering honesty of late night laments, throbbing and pulsing with the energy of a London evening. It’s at once both cinematic (when pushed tendai speaks of his love of the art of filmmaking) and disarmingly intimate; in tendai’s own words “this is music to feel in your bones". Unbounded by genre and at once both nostalgic and totally contemporary, tendai’s stories of being young and falling in and out of love in London have a universality that will resonate in cities around the world.