For the Record is a weekly column that 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! If you’d like to submit a forthcoming recording for consideration, please email information to nightafternight@icloud.com. (Streams and downloads preferred.)
All opinions expressed herein are solely my own, and do not reflect the views of my employer.
Topspin.
Molly Joyce
State Change
(Better Company/130701; DL)
Molly Joyce is, according to her official working biography, “a composer and performer whose work explores disability as a creative source across composition, performance, collaboration, and research.” Joyce, as most close followers of New York’s new-music scene likely know, was grievously injured in an automobile accident as a child, very nearly losing her left hand.
Her condition, and the way her life has evolved to accommodate it, have been at the core of her art from the start. On Breaking and Entering, her debut solo album, Joyce addressed her body like an estranged intimate, singing plaintively over accompaniments she fashioned with a toy organ and electronic treatments. (My friend and colleague Vanessa Ague published a perceptive feature about the record on her blog, The Road to Sound.)
With Perspective, issued in 2022 and covered succinctly in this newsletter, Joyce reversed the microphone, fashioning reporterly vignettes with recorded testimony from other people living with disabilities, detailing their views about weakness, control, and resilience.
But with State Change, issued by Better Company in partnership with the FatCat label’s influential 130701 imprint, she examines her own lived experience with a focus you might be tempted to called clinical, were that term not a bit too much on the nose. After “August 6, 1999” opens with a sustained tone not unlike a flatline near an operating table, Joyce intones terms extracted from the medical reports surrounding her accident in hymn-like lines swathed in disembodied echo.
It’s an arresting premise—and one that might give a listener pause, based solely on a written description. But the music – realized with Mari Kimura’s MUGIC (Music/User Gesture Interface Control) sensor, motion-capture systems, pressure-sensitive platforms, and other technological implements – is suffused with recognizably human sensations.
The uncompromising song cycle is awash in dislocation and contradiction. Where Joyce details her somatic disruption with impassive calm in “August 13 + 16, 1999,” a vocal cameo by polymath shock chameleon Fire-Toolz disputes that impression with throat-shredding rage (and, admittedly, makes you wonder if a smooth jazz techno-grindcore remix might follow). Joyce meets the moment as a vocalist everywhere; singing through a vocoder in “November 24, 1999,” she is disembodied, a stranger to the vessel she catalogs.
Throughout the album, co-producer William Brittelle – no stranger to artistic reinvention following trauma – extends Joyce’s uncanny electro-physical sound world in ways subtle and profound, teasing out emotional responses the artist seems reluctant to reveal until the cathartic glow of closer “July 27, 2007.” It’s never easy listening, however appealing or consoling the melodies and textures might be, but State Change is a landmark achievement for Joyce, and one of the year’s most remarkable creative statements.
New this week.
Siavash Amini - Caligo (Room40)
Kyle Bruckmann/Doug Dillaman/Jason Wach - GUT INSTINCT: An Aural Purification Enhancement (self-released)
Brian Current/Marie Clements - Missing - Artists of the Opera Missing (ATOM)/Timothy Long (Bright Shiny Things)
Joshua Fried - phse 4 EP (phse)
Fuubutsushi - Columbia Deluxe (American Dreams)
Jason Kao Hwang - Myths of Origin (True Sound Recordings)
Molly Joyce - State Change (130701)
Peter Scott Lewis - Pacific Triptych - Blair McMillen (Sono Luminus)
Ava Mendoza/gabby fluke-mogul/Carolina Pérez - Mama Killa (Burning Ambulance)
Alan Niblock, John Butcher, Mark Sanders - Tectonic Plates (577 Records)
Benoît Pioulard - Stanza IV (Disques d’Honoré)
Quince Ensemble - Dust Bowl - compositions by Woody Guthrie, Michael Miller, Evan Williams, Eliza Brown, Annika Socolofsky, Liz Gre, Elizabeth Pearse, Carrie Henneman Shaw, and Amanda DeBoer Bartlett (self-released)
Isaac Shieh - Caprice Reimagined – New Works for Natural Horn - compositions by Jacques-François Gallay, Dai Fujikura, Michael Finnissy, Timo Andres, Grace-Evangeline Mason, Rockey Sun Keting, Amanda Cole, Georgia Scott, Scott Wollschleger, Electra Perivolaris, Lloyd Coleman, James B. Wilson, and Robin Haigh (New Focus)
Sifter - Flake/Fracture (Queen Bee)
Cecil Taylor/Tony Oxley - Flashing Spirits (Burning Ambulance; recorded 1988)
Upcoming releases.
July 18.
Ross Lee Finney - Landscapes Remembered - Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose (BMOP/sound)
Shuying Li - The Last Hive Mind - Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose (BMOP/sound)
Vines (Cassie Wieland) - I’ll be here (Vines Music)
July 20.
Julia Eckhardt - Blanca (Another Timbre)
Morton Feldman - Intermission 6 - Antti Tolvi (Another Timbre)
Magnus Granberg - The Willow Bends and So Do I - Skogen (Another Timbre)
James Opstad - Drift - performances by Apartment House, Heather Roche, and GBSR Duo (Another Timbre)
Marc Sabat - Bach Tunings - Sara Cubarsi & Xenia Gogu (Another Timbre)
August 22.
Squanderers (Wendy Eisenberg, David Grubbs, Kramer) - Skantagio (Shimmy-Disc)
August 29.
Darian Donovan Thomas - A Room with Many Doors: Day (New Amsterdam)
September 5.
Matthew Ryals with effe effe - Exalge (Infrequent Seams)
September 12.
Tomas Fujiwara - Dream Up (Out of Your Head)
September 19.
Noah Garabedian - Quartets and Solos (Contagious Music)
Find many more upcoming releases in For the Record: The Master List, here.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.