Pitchfork

The vaguely creepy-looking British Oscar winner Tilda Swinton is having a big year. First, she managed to bang George Clooney and Brad Pitt in consecutive films (Burn After Reading and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) (spoiler alert), and now she's about to be all over Battle, the forthcoming album from her glam-goth compatriot Patrick Wolf.

Swinton won't be singing on the follow-up to The Magic Position. Rather, she'll be making spoken-word appearances on four songs, acting as a "voice of hope," whatever that might possibly mean. I'm imagining she'll be something like the robot-voice host lady on Midnight Marauders, but we'll see. [Or maybe Marianne Faithfull's cameo on "Magpie" from The Magic Position. - Ed.]

Turns out Swinton and Wolf did not actually bond over their shared androgyny, translucent skin, and birdlike bone structure. Instead, Wolf, a longtime fan of Swinton, enlisted his unlikely collaborator by slipping her a CD and a hand-written note at the premiere of Swinton's 2008 drama Julia, and Swinton got back to him a few days later.

Here's what Swinton has to say about the project, via a press release: "My feeling is that we almost certainly come from the same planet: kith and kin. His music feels like the unexpressed soundtrack of a great film I want to see - and try to catch every night before I go to sleep. It's a lovely thing to be a part of that magical landscape."

Wolf is due to release Battle sometime this spring on his own label, Bloody Chamber Music. He's teamed up with Bandstocks, a new-model music-funding website that allows anyone interested to buy "stock" in artists. Stockholders will get a share in whatever profits the album makes, plus they get to brag at parties that they helped to fund the Patrick Wolf album with Tilda Swinton on it.