the dengie Hundred and Gemma Blackshaw - Days in Pieces the dengie Hundred and Gemma Blackshaw

...deeply spartan and shiver-worthy – The Quietus, 2024
...the pulse of human bodies and private hum of the dark feel like the dominant frequencies – World of Echo, 2024
...utterly sublime material – essential listening for fans of Grouper’s earliest work, Nurse With Wound or Félicia Atkinson – Boomkat, 2026

Days in Pieces is the second collaborative album from The Dengie Hundred with Gemma Blackshaw. It follows their debut Who Will You Love, which brought hushed vocals, recorded from home while children were sleeping, to looping, nocturnal beats, found sounds and spectral oscillations. The album was included in The Quietus albums of the year 2024.

Since that release, The Dengie Hundred has continued to work on his distinctive sound across solo projects including cassette releases Remnants (with Sagome) and Viaduct (with Altered States Tapes).

As a duo, they contributed to The Black Hill, The Glass Sky project, an exploration of Scottish myth, folklore and landscape curated by Glasgow collective Somewhere Press. Their contribution Aviir garnered praise from Mary Anne Hobbs on her Radio 6 show and evolved into a sister release Songs for Isserley, described by Boomkat as “ravishing and terrifying”.

Like their debut album, the songs on Days in Pieces ruminate on romantic love, but the words recorded alone at Blackshaw’s home by the sea are sharper and spikier, her voice coming further forward in the mix. The demands and disenchantments of relationships between lovers are balanced with Blackshaw’s spellbound address to her son, who she remembers holding in her arms above the waves in the album’s closing lullaby.

Love is lunar here, pulling its objects towards itself, including those of grown men who find themselves returned to bedtime stories as weeping children, their tears pooling like Alice’s to form other, infinitely smaller seas.

How do we piece ourselves and each other together through the daily, tidal flows of love and loss?

Days in Pieces, accompanied by images of moonlit shore, shell and seaweed by artist Esther Teichmann, seeks to know. 

credits

releases May 1, 2026

Songs And Vocals by Gemma Blackshaw.
Music and Production by The Dengie Hundred.
Days in Pieces was mastered by Carim Clasmann, and mastered and cut for vinyl by Stefan Betke (aka Pole).
Esther Teichmann kindly agreed to the reproduction of works from her series Mondschwimmin (2015) and Heavy the Sea (2018).
Mark Thomson designed the sleeve.
Alice Butler provided the sleeve notes.