O.R.k. Release Video For New Single 'Black Blooms' Featuring Serj Tankian Of System Of A Dow

O.R.k., featuring Italy’s celebrated vocalist, producer and award-winning film score composer Lorenzo Esposito Fornasari a.k.a LEF (lead vocals), King Crimson's Pat Mastelotto (drums), Porcupine Tree's Colin Edwin (bass), Marta Sui Tubi's Carmelo Pipitone (guitars) have revealed their new single and video for “Black Blooms” which features their collaboration with the iconic System Of A Down frontman, Serj Tankian.

O.R.k bassist Colin Edwin explains how the collaboration with Serj Tankian came about “The involvement of Serj Tankian came about through legendary producer Bill Laswell, who played bass on Lef's 2018 solo album ‘Hypersomniac’. Laswell passed a copy of ‘Hypersomniac’ to Serj, who was impressed enough to also check out O.R.k. and our previous two albums. This led directly to Lef and Serj connecting and discussing potentially collaborating at some point; it was just at the time we were working on ‘Ramagehead’, so of course a suggestion had to be made. Lef sent him the tracks as a ‘work in progress’ and from this, Serj himself chose "Black Blooms" as the song he wished to sing and work with us on.”

Colin continues “The development of “Black Blooms” took a few unexpected turns as we all contributed along the way, Pat Mastelotto's masterful drumming added an underlying aspect of urgency I hadn't anticipated on the original demo, and Carmelo Pipitone manages to strike a superlative balance between sensitivity and total fireworks as the song progresses. The atmosphere was always going to be a great context for Lef's vocals, but the biggest surprise was Serj Tankian's involvement, which really amazed me when I first heard it, he's added, not simply a great vocal performance, but the exact amount of extra depth to the framework, to turn it into something truly special, and if I didn't know better, I would have thought "Black Blooms" was made with him in mind.