It is with great sadness that we let you know that our friend Eoin French, known to many the world over as Talos, has passed away after a short illness.
Eoin passed peacefully in his sleep early on the morning of Sunday August 11 2024 in his native Cork, surrounded by his loved ones.
A beautiful soul, a true artist, a son, a husband, a father, and a friend. We are devastated by his passing.
As was his wish, there will be new music from Talos to share with you all in the future.
Team Talos.
A Dawning, the film. Directed by our brilliant friend Níall O’Brien (@niallito ) and set to the album’s title track.
Shot in Iceland and Ireland, told through real people, real places, their memories, and the slow transformation that follows loss. The film is a celebration of life and the things that make it worth living.
I am immensely proud of this one… Thank you so much to the crazy amount of people involved! A credits post will follow 🤍
Follow the link in my bio to watch the full film.
A Dawning’ by Ólafur Arnalds and Talos is released today. Thank you to everyone who has been listening to this beautiful record, and for your lovely messages and comments.
Thanks to everyone involved - Mary and all of Eoin’s friends for helping steer the ship; those who contributed to the recording and mixing process; Niall O’Brien and Steve Battle for the ‘A Dawning’ video; Mani Sigfusson for the visualisers and Hildur, Arni and all at OPIA, and the Mercury KX/Universal team for all the work on the label side.
Special thanks to Ólafur for his dedication, sensitivity and care in bringing this project into the world.
Eoin’s family and Team Talos.
I am nervously excited to tell you that A Dawning is finally out in the world!
These songs tell the story of a beautiful friendship in its entirety and throughout everything we went through they became a place of solace, a reason to meet, a place to pour our grief into. It is a celebration of life and the time we shared together - as friends and as a community.
Thank you to everyone who helped make A Dawning a reality. Our friends, family, collaborators and everyone who held us through this process. This would not have been possible without you.
I hope I’ve done you proud brother 🤍
A special ‘A Dawning’ notebook is now available to pre-order via Ólafur’s website - with all proceeds going to the Marymount Hospice in Cork to support their amazing, selfless work.
These sketchbook are high quality, soft cover, A6-sized books - and are decorated with artwork by Eoin.
They can be ordered from the link in bio.
When Eoin French – better known as Talos – passed, his friend Ólafur Arnalds was left with demos, grief, and a single question – how do you complete a record when its co-creator is gone?
“What is an album? Just because you did fifty vocal takes and picked the best one, does that make it count? What does it mean to present something in a finished way?” Arnalds tells @soapyleighwater for this week’s cover feature.
He channelled his grief into into A Dawning – released this week – which Arnalds worked on it for three months after French’s passing, having to make decisions without his musical partner’s presence which had made the process of making it a pleasure and not a private torture. “You don’t want to fake anything – I didn’t just want to put these unfinished songs into autotune and just fix it. It started bringing up questions about vulnerability, and whether we could stand with an unfinished thing. Is a thing ever finished, anyway?” Arnalds says.
French was diagnosed with a terminal illness in Reykjavík. After being released from hospital, he chose to stay with Arnalds. He was too ill to create anything by that stage, but Arnalds believes those weeks were just as important to the album’s story. “I felt like we were getting closer as humans. An experience like this brings you very, very close,” he shares. “We would spend our nights at home, often just listening to music, listening to what we had created or talking about it. I remember this one night while we were cooking, and he just sat down by the piano in our home and he started playing. To see him become himself again - his most true self – and express himself through the piano was just a fantastic experience. And those experiences shaped what we created.”
“I felt like I spent a lot of time with him after he passed,” adds Arnalds. “Every day I worked on this record, it felt like I had this really long, soft goodbye … Before I answer anything, I ask him first. In the back of my mind, there’s a silence where I still wait for him.”
Read the full story over on thelineofbestfit.com
🎶 @olafurarnalds + @thisistalos
✍️ @soapyleighwater
📸 @catgundrybeck
💿 @opiacommunity
Next Friday, July 11th, A Dawning by Ólafur Arnalds and Talos will finally be out in the world.
As you may have seen there are a few in-person listening events next week, but for those that can’t attend, you are invited to an online listening event on Youtube on July 10th at 12pm EST / 9AM PST / 5pm BST - link in bio to set a reminder!
This is a chance to listen to the album in full once before it releases officially.
Ólafur’s team are extending their Shared Time concept to this event, inviting listeners to share drawings/paintings/writing via #ADawning. All tagged content will be collected on the A Dawning website - link in bio.
A Dawning, the new album by @olafurarnalds and Talos, is out in just over two weeks, on July 11 va @opiacommunity / @mercurykx . You can pre-order the album on beautiful coloured vinyl, standard black vinyl and CD. A limited number of the signed art print bundles remain. Available from the link in bio now.
This is Bedrock ft @sandrayati , the third single from A Dawning by @thisisTalos and myself, out on July 11th.
We wrote Bedrock in West Cork. In between writing sessions Eoin and I would drive around and he would show me all these historical sites, one of them an old ritual stone circle. The song is partly inspired by Michelangelo and the ideas of the body beyond the rock. His incomplete working practice, seen in works like The Atlas, are believed to have illustrated the difficulty of the artist carving out the figures from the block of marble - of the struggle of man to free spirit from matter.
Thanks to @sandrayati for your beautiful contribution and to @maxmaxporter for your part in the process of words.
Follow the link in bio to listen to Bedrock.
Thank you to everyone who bought tickets to the Remembering Talos show, which is now sold out. Here is the track list to A Dawning, presented in English, Icelandic and Irish. In the words of Ólafur: “A Dawning … is written and performed in english, while being heavily influenced by the places in which it was made, Reykjavík and West Cork.
“Iceland and Ireland have many similarities, aside from having nearly the same name. One of which is that they are homes to ancient languages that are at risk of becoming extinct. So in honour of that I’d love to share with you the track list for our upcoming album, in it’s original english form, as well as icelandic and irish.”
A Dawning is out everywhere on the 11th of July. Link in bio for more info. Thanks to Noelle Nic Thomáis for helping with the Irish translation.
