There admittedly aren’t many spoken-word albums on the horizon that we are looking forward to, but the minute we heard that John Malkovich was working on one, we were enamored. Malkovich previously shared a collaboration with Cars’ frontman Ric Ocasek, and today, he shared “Cryolife 7:14 A.M.”, which was mixed by Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon. If this song and the Ocasek-mixed “Cryoblue Cheese O” are any indication, the album is going to be a psychedelic, free-form, beautiful mess. Listen to both songs below.

“[Ono] is obviously very bright and super interesting and very enigmatic,” Malkovich told Rolling Stone. “She’s had a very interesting journey and led an incredibly interesting life. She’s lived–and lived through–a lot of cultural changes and the great thing is, she’s still doing stuff. I always have a great deal of respect for people who do that.”

Ocasek previously said about working with Malkovich’s idiosyncratic vocals, “The poem Allegory of the Cave narrated by John Malkovich sounded eerie to me, so I set it into that kind of musical landscape. The poem felt current, even though it was written around 380 BC by Plato. Only the ridiculers and weapons have changed as we move through time.”

The project, titled Like A Puppet Show, has an interesting concept: Malkovich read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave backed by an original piece of music, then invited other artists to provide their own interpretations of the track, including OMD, Placebo, Young The Giant, Efterklang, the Dandy Warhols, Blondie’s Chris Stein, the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan, and others.

Like A Puppet Show is set to be released on vinyl for Record Store Day’s Black Friday event on November 27.

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HT: Rolling Stone
Featured image courtesy of Pitchfork