Available now on all streaming platforms
Limited vinyl run coming soon
Animals and Spirits
​1. Post-Inauguration Blues [9:06]
2. Finch [4:06]
3. Pecorino [5:30]
4. Live Stream From The Wayfarer [1:04]
5. Visitor [4:05]
6. Beast [4:11]
7. Falling Leaves [5:25]
8. Acceptance Speech (Epilogue) [1:33]
Written, performed, recorded & produced by Paul Prestipino
Mastering: Bob Scott​
Cover photo: Rosa Alice & Simon Rippingale
Available Jan 1 2026
Paul Prestipino's second album, Animals and Spirits, follows a lone protagonist through a dystopian landscape—dispatches from a world where humanity has frayed, where survival is both urgent and quiet.
The album has a shape: Post-Inauguration Blues opens as a prologue and lament for the world, written the day after watching the 2017 US presidential inauguration. What follows are songs of a wayfarer set somewhere in the not-too-distant future, navigating a world still breathing—grounded in nature, loneliness, and uncertain encounters, interspersed midway by a 'live stream' interlude: footsteps on a bush track leading to water. The album closes with the spectral arrangement of Falling Leaves—an allegory, a memory, a confession—before sending us into the future for an epilogue where nothing is left but crickets and frogs, inheritors of the world.
The heart of the album was recorded in a week in July 2017 at a cottage at Bundanon Trust, NSW. Approached as demos captured at a kitchen table with a handheld microphone, classical guitar, and mandolin, all were rough takes that Prestipino left intact as foundations, deciding the time, place, and spirit felt integral to the work. The album was later shaped over several years with attention to arranging, layering, and sonic detail. While synth parts were added 'to warm and comfort the protagonist,' minimal electronics keep the songs rooted in guitar and voice, with atmosphere seeping through every gap.
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"Make no mistake, his heart is open, and it may wreck yours as it did mine, but the listening spent with his utterly unique voice pays back tenfold.​
Like a flare in the night, Prestipino illuminates what we cannot turn from. A modern masterstroke."
— Kingsley Reeve, liner notes
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From Paul:
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The heart of Animals and Spirits was recorded in a week in July 2017 in a cottage surrounded by kangaroos at Bundanon Trust, NSW, Australia, on traditional Dharawal and Dhurga land. Approached initially as 'demos', the songs were captured at the cottage's kitchen table with a single handheld microphone, a classical guitar and a mandolin. In 2019, a newer and slower version of Post-Inauguration Blues (the one on this album) was recorded at the same cottage, but this time with electric guitar and a piano break. I also wrote a new track while there - Visitor. The intention was to re-record the original Bundanon demos one day back at my studio in Sydney but... well, yeah, nah... and in the end, I decided to leave the recordings pretty much as they were - the time, place and spirit in which they were captured felt integral to these songs (as did the technical glitches and artefacts they contained). I decided to later add only some synth parts (to warm and comfort our protagonist) and some additional vocals.​​​​​​​​​​​​​
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Falling Leaves, another 'demo', was not recorded at Bundanon but in an old (some say haunted) rectory in Maitland, NSW, about nine months earlier. I rediscovered the track in 2024 while finalising mixes for Animals and Spirits and decided to include it on the record. It made sense on a personal level to do so. In retrospect, the personal events that inspired Falling Leaves - combined with watching the televised 2017 inauguration ceremony of the 45th US president (I began writing Post-Inauguration Blues the following day) - set up the metaphoric, dystopian landscape which forms the backdrop to the Bundanon demos. ​
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That said, Pecorino was written a decade earlier - at a kitchen table in Sicily - which is another story - and slighty fucks up this story, but the themes sit... I guess nothing really changes in ten years. (Though to be fair, there was a rich, misogynistic narcissist in power in Italy at the time).
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Live Stream From the Wayfarer and the epilogue were eleventh hour additions to the album. Live Stream..combines a brief excerpt from an early sound piece (Tree, 2012) with a mobile phone recording made on a bush track in Palawa country near Hobart a few days after finalising the record. In retrospect, I wish I had thought of this piece earlier. I would have organised a horse for the recording. For now, please just imagine the horse walking alongside the wayfarer. ​​​It alarms me that future humans may one day really need to imagine such beautiful sounds. So perhaps this broadcast, without the horse, actually/ poetically hits the nail on the head thematically.​
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Acceptance Speech (Epilogue) says precisely what I want it to although it took a while to find the title. The crickets were recorded one night in 2011 near the border of Victoria and New South Wales (Australia); the frogs, near the border of Florida and Georgia (USA) one night in 2004. I still remember standing mesmerised under the stars listening to these frogs - so am pleased that an excerpt from that recording has made its way, unplanned, onto this record.
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A sense of concern and survival clearly permeates Animals and Spirits - fuelled by political and paternal anxiety - however humour is never fully lost on our protagonist amidst his hallucinations and wanderings, nor an awareness that the stars indeed still shine.
I hope you enjoy it - Paul (2026)
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