For the Record: August 30, 2024.
An enterprising conductor's eclectic, satisfying mixtape is the Album of the Week… plus new arrivals and upcoming releases.
For the Record rounds up details about new and pending recordings of interest to the new-music community: contemporary classical music and jazz, electronic and electroacoustic music, and idioms for which no clever genre name has been coined, on CD, vinyl LP, cassette, digital-only formats… you name it.
This list of release dates is culled from press releases, Amazon, Bandcamp, and other internet stores and sources, social-media posts, and online resources such as Discogs. Dates cited typically correspond to initial U.S. release, and are subject to change. (Links to Amazon, used when all else fails, do not imply endorsement.)
These listings are not comprehensive—nor could they be! To submit a forthcoming recording for consideration, email information to nightafternight@icloud.com.
All opinions expressed herein are solely my own, and do not express the views of any employer.
Album of the week.
Dalia Stasevska
Dalia’s Mixtape
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Compositions by Anna Meredith, Andrea Tarrodi, Judith Weir, Caroline Shaw, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Julius Eastman, SØS Gunver Ryberg, Noriko Koide, and Julia Wolfe
(Platoon)
It’s not on Bandcamp, alas, but my favorite new release today is an album I’ve been savoring for months now… one piece at a time. Dalia’s Mixtape, by the dynamic Finnish-Ukrainian conductor Dalia Stasevska with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, has been trickling out at a pace of roughly two pieces per month since its launch in March with a maximally hooky earworm, Anna Meredith’s Nautilus.
As more pieces showed up, Stasevska’s range of interests as a performer and as a listener came increasingly into focus. There’s the dreamlike mist of Andrea Tarrodi’s Wildwood, the iridescent Still, Glowing from Judith Weir, Caroline Shaw’s cinematic The Observatory, three pieces from Jóhann Jóhannsson’s sublime Miners’ Hymns, and so on.
With the arrival earlier this week of what appears to be the album’s principal coup – Julius Eastman’s Symphony No. II - The Faithful Friend: The Lover Friend's Love for the Beloved, evidently in its first commercially available recording – all that remained to arrive is Pretty, by Julia Wolfe. Since that piece arrived this morning, the album is complete: a fairly unbeatable survey of contemporary orchestral works, conducted with conviction and played with distinction.
Whether this collection will see physical release is anyone’s guess, but it’s available now for streaming in all the usual places. Go check it out—and read my friend and colleague AZ Madonna’s terrific, timely recent Boston Globe profile of Stasevska while you’re at it.
Bonus tracks.
Though it doesn’t exactly fit the purview of this newsletter, Twenty Pills Without Water is noteworthy because I say so. (Get it?) Besides, Boston art-pop band Bent Knee isn’t completely alien to these to these shores, having collaborated with Mantra Percussion for an Ecstatic Music Festival project in 2018. The album is the first full-length release for the group’s new quartet incarnation. Previously a prog-adjacent sextet, the band sounds reborn: a real feat, given the oversize personalities and contributions of the two members who left the fold. I’ve been trying for years to describe what Bent Knee sounds like, starting eight years ago in the Boston Globe, and still haven’t unlocked that particular box. (The abovementioned AZ Madonna took a great stab at it in the same paper, two years later.) So here’s what the band says: “Influenced by Phoebe Bridgers, Prince, and In Rainbows-era Radiohead, Twenty Pills Without Water is an album full of ghosts and coping mechanisms.” Sounds about right: both group and album are sly, sexy, brassy, and bursting with style and assurance.
The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid, the arresting alt-emo, chamber-screech song cycle issued by Seth Graham and More Eaze under the collective name ---__--___, was one of my most-played, most-admired albums of 2021. Today it has a potent sequel, Night of Fire, on which the founding duo share credit with a collaborator from the first LP, hyperpop-hardcore vocalist and producer Recovery Girl. It’s primal and precious, and there’s nothing else like it.
Evening Air, the new duo release from Loren Connors and David Grubbs, is as sublime as you’d anticipate a meeting of these two profound musicians to be: unhurried, contemplative, unpredictable, transporting.
I raved about Big Majestic, the glorious new album by composer Ellen Reid and a clutch of estimable collaborators, back in July. Back then you could only listen to one track; today, all is revealed.
I’ve not yet had a chance to listen to the new recording of Kaija Saariaho’s gripping second opera, Adriana Mater, newly released by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony on Deutsche Grammophon… but I’m glad it exists – albeit as a digital-only release – and I’ll be dipping in soon.
Lastly, next Friday, Sept. 6, is the first Bandcamp Friday of the fall. (Two more follow on Oct. 4 and Dec. 6.) Now, no one’s going to hold it against you for shopping today, but maybe tuck a few items away for next week, when artists and indie labels will make just a bit more on each sale.
New this week.
---__--___ - Night of Fire (Orange Milk)
Laurie Anderson - Amelia (Nonesuch)
Barker/Parker/Irabagon - Bakunawa (Out of Your Head)
Rachel Beetz - Pareidolia (self-released)
Ilia Belorukov & Marina Džukljev - Everything Changes, Nothing Disappears (Acheulian Handaxe)
David Borden & Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co. - Make Way for Mother Mallard: 50 Years of Music (Cuneiform)
Rebecca Bruton & Jason Doell - a root or mirror, blossom, madder, cracks; together - Quatuor Bozzini & junctQín (Collection QB)
Loren Connors & David Grubbs - Evening Air (Room40)
Paul Dooley - Masks and Machines - Lisa Pegher, Adam Unsworth, Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose (BMOPsound)
Jan Esbra - Suspended in a Breath (Phantom Limb)
Tim Feeney & Cassia Streb - Betwixt (Harmonic Ooze)
Philip Ellis Foster - The Cosmos Project (Infrequent Seams)
Happy Apple - New York CD (Sunnyside)
Lia Kohl - Normal Sounds (Moon Glyph)
Paola Prestini, Royce Vavrek & Karmina Šilec - The Old Man and the Sea (VIA Records)
Ellen Reid - Big Majestic (New Amsterdam)
Kaija Saariaho - Adriana Mater - Fleur Barron, Axelle Fanyo, Nicholas Phan, Christopher Purves, San Francisco Symphony Chorus, San Francisco Symphony/Esa-Pekka Salonen (Deutsche Grammophon)
Dalia Stasevska/BBC Symphony Orchestra - Dalia’s Mixtape - compositions by Anna Meredith, Andrea Tarrodi, Judith Weir, Caroline Shaw, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Julius Eastman, SØS Gunver Ryberg, Noriko Koide, and Julia Wolfe (Platoon)
Michael Torke - Bloom - Sandbox Percussion (Ecstatic)
Vasco Trilla - The Bell Slept Long in its Tower (thanatosis)
Trio Catch - Gassenhauer - compositions by Mikel Urquiza, Daniela Terranova, Jakub Rataj, Milica Djordjević, Matthias Kranebitter, Sara Glojnarić, and Martin Schüttler (bastille musique)
Miguel Zenón - Golden City (Miel Music)
Upcoming releases.
September 5
David Garland - Noise in You (new version) (Tall Owl Audio)
David Garland - Vulneraries, Vol. 7 (Tall Owl Audio)
David Garland - Vulneraries, Vol. 8 (Tall Owl Audio)
September 6
Tim Berne & Bill Frisell - Live in Someplace Nice (Screwgun)
Allen Lowe & the Constant Sorrow Orchestra - Louis Armstrong’s America (ESP-Disk’)
Laetitia Sonami/Éliane Radigue - a Song for two Mothers/Occam IX (Black Truffle)
Dustin Wong & Gregory Uhlmann - Water Map (Otherly Love)
September 10
Saviet/Houston Duo - a clearing (Marginal Frequency)
September 13
Marco Baldini - Fuochi (Dinzu Artefacts)
Lea Bertucci - Hold Music (Dinzu Artefacts)
Henry Fraser - Breath Line (Dinzu Artefacts)
David Fulmer - immaculate sigh of stars - performances by Stefan Jackiw with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie/Matthias Pintscher, Horszowski Trio, Nathan Ben-Yehuda, León Bernsdorf, Jay Campbell, Conor Hanick, Parker Ramsay, Conrad Tao, and Mike Truesdell (New Focus)
September 20
Kyle Bruckmann - Duty Cycle/Active Cultures (Already Dead)
Caroline Davis - Portals, Volume 2: Returning (Intakt)
Arthur Levering - OceanRiverLake - performances by Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose, Lydian String Quartet, Donald Berman, Sarah Brady, and Maarten Stragier (New Focus)
Patrick Shiroishi - Glass House (Otherly Love)
Anthony Vine - Sound Spring (Kuyin)
September 27
Buechi–Hellmüller–Jerjen - Pink Mountain Sagas (Intakt)
October 1
Toshiya Tsunoda/Taku Unami - Wovenland 3 (Erstwhile)
October 4
Anna Butterss - Mighty Vertebrate (International Anthem)
Peni Candra Rini - Wani (New Amsterdam)
Concepción Huerta/Hara Alonso - towards the melancholy of a future (Superpang)
John McCowen - Mundanas VII-XI - John McCowen, Madison Greenstone (Mengi)
Megafortress (Bill Gillim) - Adversary (Strategy of Tension)
Weird of Mouth (Craig Taborn, Mette Rasmussen, Ches Smith) - Weird of Mouth (Otherly Love)
October 8
Jason Robinson - Ancestral Numbers II (Playscape)
October 11
Craig Shepard - On Foot: Aubervilliers (Infrequent Seams)
Tyshawn Sorey - The Susceptible Now (Pi Recordings)
Immanuel Wilkins - Blues Blood (Blue Note)
October 18
Lisel - The Vanishing Point (Ba Da Bing)
Camila Nebbia/Angelica Sanchez - in another land, another dream (Relative Pitch)
The Necks - Bleed (Northern Spy)
October 25
Félicia Atkinson - Space As an Instrument (Shelter Press)
Daniela Huerta - Soplo (Elevator Bath)
Charlotte Jacobs - a t l a s (New Amsterdam)
November 8
Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz - The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 (Freedom to Spend)
Find many more upcoming releases in For the Record: The Master List, here.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.
Thanks for the tip on Dalia’s Mixtape - can’t wait to listen, especially for that Eastman!