For the Record: Oct. 27, 2023.
A brand-new NYC concert series from a seasoned curator… two weeks' worth of takes on recordings… and dozens of listings for new 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.
The lead-in.
For the record: There was no For the Record update published last Friday, Oct. 20. Apologies for missing that missal, and the Tuesday episode, too. Sometimes things fall apart at the busy intersection of Life and Work.
Listings will be back next Tuesday—but here’s a big deal coming sooner…
Barely has David Watson had time to savor “retirement” after a stellar run curating the Shift series at FourOneOne in Williamsburg than he gets sucked back into business, curating a new nomadic series called Striped Light. The debut event is this Monday, Oct. 30 in Long Island City – Queens represent!! – and features a rare NYC appearance by In Defense of Memory, a collaborative featuring multi-hyphenate artists Laura Ortman, Carlos Santistevan, and Marshall Trammell.
The trio, described as “a support network that connects artists and advocates for positive social change and equitable education across regions of North America and the world,” tops a bill that also includes Watson playing with bassist Luke Stewart and a solo performance by percussion shaman Sean Meehan.
Great as this bill is, I’m not at all certain I can make it—but I hope some of you will get there and then brag about it right to my face. Admission is $15, online or at the door (cash preferred, Venmo accepted.) You’ll get the exact address for the event when you buy a ticket via Eventbrite or R.S.V.P. via Instagram DM.
Backspin.
Before we get into today’s new music, there’s a lot to admire among the titles I missed listing last week, which I don’t want to leave unmentioned:
Tristan Allen - Tin Iso and the Dawn (RNVG Intl.)
Erlend Apneseth Trio with Maja S.K. Ratkje - Collage (Hubro)
Arp - The Enormous Room (Longform Editions)
Sylvie Courvoisier - Chimaera (Intakt)
Curha (Curtis Hasselbring) - Trombonix (self-released)
Jeremiah Cymerman - The Fallow Terrain of Now (5049)
Dania - arête (Longform Editions)
DUOT & ZARM Ensemble - DUOT with Strings (Fundacja Słuchaj)
Mia Dyberg Trio - Timestretch (Clean Feed)
Miha Gantar - Amsterdam (Clean Feed)
Gates/Dunn/Fox - Deliriant Modifier (Riverworm)
Hannah Marks - Outsider, Outlier (Out of Your Head)
Monocot - Leave to Cool (Astral Editions)
Simon Nabatov 3+2 - Verbs (Clean Feed)
Aruán Ortiz - Pastor’s Paradox (Clean Feed)
Ivo Perelman/Nate Wooley/Mat Maneri/Fred Lonberg-Holm/Joe Morris/Matt Moran - Seven Skies Orchestra (Fundacja Słuchaj)
Adam Pultz - Wade (Carrier)
William Susman - Quiet Rhythms Live at Spectrum NYC (Belarca)
SUSS & Andrew Tuttle - Rising (Longform Editions)
Sybarite5 - Collective Wisdom - compositions by Curtis Stewart, Jessica Meyer, Pedro Giraudo, Jackson Greenberg, Michael Gilbertson, Komitas, and Punch Brothers (Bright Shiny Things)
Andrew Tasselmyer - diary #1 (Sonic Dialogue)
Triola - Scapegoat (Constructive)
Unknown Shore with Carlos Zingaro & Helena Espvall - House of Memory (Fundacja Słuchaj)
Christina Vantzou - Observations, edits, a cure for restlessness (Longform Editions)
Anna Webber - Shimmer Wince (Intakt)
Anna Webber & Matt Mitchell - Capacious Aeration (Tzadik)
Girma Yifrashewa - My Strong Will - Girma Yifrashewa, Valentin Toshev, Ivaylo Danailov, Mihail Zhivkov, Victor Traykov, Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra/Dian Tchobanov (Unseen Worlds)
Anna Webber’s Shimmer Wince, for one, has been fascinating and enchanting me for many weeks now – I’ll urge you to read Martin Johnson (gift link) in the Wall Street Journal on that subject, despite my mild concern about a pejorative taint to the term academic applied therein.
Anyone who responds to that album won’t need any urging to check out Webber’s twisty duo session with Matt Mitchell, Capacious Aeration, new on Tzadik and thus streaming everywhere except for Bandcamp.
Speaking of Bandcamp, and more specifically its ubiquitously admired Bandcamp Daily editorial platform: uh-oh.
Tin Iso and the Dawn, the score Tristan Allen composed for their “shadow-puppet symphony” of the same title, is one of the loveliest and most enchanting projects I’ve heard this year, and that counts for a lot—any year, really, but especially this one. Don’t miss it. You can learn more via a recent episode of The Seltzer Salon, a podcast produced by the prodigiously busy Brad Rose for Foxy Digitalis.
Speaking of Brad, he’s got a new podcast series worth your attention: Songs of Our Lives, in which he and guests like Jeff Tobias, Nina Dante, and Marc Masters dig into the notion that every life has its own personal soundtrack. More here.
Collective Wisdom is the first album by eclectic string quintet Sybarite5 in five years, and the debut of the band’s new line-up. It’s chock full of strong sounds, from new pieces by composer-performers Jessica Mayer and Curtis Stewart to arrangements of selections by Komitas and Punch Brothers. Lend an ear now, and mark your calendar for the group’s Death of Classical “Crypt Lab Series” residency Nov. 28–30.
Read on for a bit more about a specific track from this album, lurking below.
Pastor’s Paradox, by Aruán Ortiz, is ambitious and arresting. Sylvie Courvoisier, always a rewarding pianist and composer, leads a brilliant band on her new album, Chimaera—seriously, who else thinks to put Wadada Leo Smith and Christian Fennesz side by side? Wade, by bassist/composer Adam Pultz, is a minutely detailed, richly engrossing solo session fabulously well recorded. And, having dipped just a toe into two bigger projects, I’m looking forward to spending more time with Miha Gantar’s abundant Amsterdam and Ivo Perelman’s ecstatic Seven Skies Orchestra.
And now, onward to this week and beyond…
Album of the week.
Ruiqi Wang
Subduing the Silence
(Orchard of Pomegranates; CD, DL)
Subduing the Silence is my introduction to Ruiqi Wang, a singer and composer from Hangzhou based now in Montréal, and maybe it’ll be yours, too. The album, new on Ayelet Rose Gottlieb’s Orchard of Pomegranates imprint, showcases Wang’s range, technique, and imagination impressively.
Working with the supple, powerful trio of pianist Stephanie Urquhart, bassist Summer Kodama, and drummer Mili Hong, plus the string quartet Craft Ensemble, Wang builds her program around three settings of “Xiang Leng Jin Ni,” a poem by the 11th century writer Qingzhao Li: one partnered with Hong, another unaccompanied, and the last a wordless meditation for strings.
Interspersed among these are two more text settings – one a Wang original, the other adapting Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik – plus wordless flights, both contemplative and gamboling, and instrumental interludes. The music falls within in the jazz tradition, but Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening practice and Meredith Monk’s supple technique are also in the mix.
Wang’s singing is lithe and airy, and her collaborators match the tone she sets ideally. Transitions among the album’s disparate elements are stylish and seamless, resulting in a strikingly unified whole. All told, Subduing the Silence is a brave, rewarding session, beautifully performed and handsomely recorded.
Bonus tracks.
I enjoyed every selection on Collective Wisdom, the new sybarite5 album cited above, but one piece stopped me dead in my tracks. Apartments opens with the sound of rain and a radio newscast, placed at disparate points in the stereo field. The string players enter at staggered intervals, ragged but essentially consonant, and proceed to play together, separately, somehow.
“Apartments explores the intersection between everyday sounds (rain, electrical wires, coffee machines), human communication (via string instruments) and current events (via AM news radio),” composer Jackson Greenberg says of the piece, explaining the sensation of simultaneity in isolation. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but a specific detail of the 1010 WINS radio broadcast, reporting that then-president Donald Trump and his wife had tested positive for COVID-19, put me in mind of pandemic shutdown, too.
I mention this here because Greenberg has a similarly striking album of his own out this week: The Things We Pass On Through Our Genes is derived from a student string quartet he composed while a grandfather was in hospice, revisited and reworked years later when another grandfather, an Auschwitz survivor, was in hospice.
The way Greenberg manipulates and transfigures his source material is meant to conjure the distance and distortion of memory and meaning over time. This it achieves, powerfully and poignantly.
Confirmation Bias, by Venezuelan sound artist Gil Sansón, is a real head trip, its quirky juxtapositions of singer-songwriter reflexes, found sounds and produced noises, and fleeting fragments of indistinct narratives ideal for headphone space. It’s Sansón’s second terrific release this month, following the spacious yet teeming cityscape he conjured on con richard (por la adversidad a las estrellas), issued by Unfathomless.
“Mercy is called down by Mercy to the last” Live, by Rahma Quartet, brings together Nubian Egyptian-German vocalist, artist, and curator Rasha Ragab, German stone harp player Christoph Nicolaus, Argentine multi-instrumentalist Lucio Capece, and Austrian bassist-composer Werner Dafeldecker. They’re a disparate lot, but connections run deep: Ragab and Nicolaus are partners in marriage and in a performance-art duo called toffaha; both play in a trio with Capece, who also works in a duo with Dafeldecker. The way this group blends deep, meditative drones and Sufi devotional poetry is like nothing ever I’ve heard. To quote Brian Olewnick, a longtime friend who should be writing more widely than Facebook posts, the music is “[e]xtremely immersive and very moving (despite, of course, not understanding the text), imparting a great sense of patience and empathic understanding.” Indeed.
There’s plenty more worth mentioning. I’ve very much enjoyed new releases featuring compositions by Patricia Alessandrini, Vivian Fung, and Ian Power. And playing for the first time as I type this, since it only hit my inbox around 1am, is on cabbages, salt, bacteria and transformations, a strong full-length from English sound artist Kate Carr on the consistently impressive new label Rural Situationism.
New this week.
Patricia Alessandrini - Leçons de ténèbres - Riot Ensemble (Huddersfield Contemporary Records)
Siavash Amini - eremos (American Dreams)
Bob Bellerue & Francisco Meirino - Bain d’Arsenic (Flag Day)
Doug Bielmeier - Music for Billionaires (New Focus)
Kate Carr - on cabbages, salt, bacteria and transformations (Rural Situationism)
Jackson Greenberg - The Things We Pass On Through Our Genes (cnmtx)
Jasper String Quartet - Insects & Machines – String Quartets of Vivian Fung (Sono Luminus)
Richard P. John - another memory - compositions by Richard P. John and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen (kvieto)
Samuel Jones - Three Concertos - Joseph Alessi, Jeffrey Khaner, Michael Ludwig, Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose (BMOPsound)
Line Gate - Trap (Mappa)
Hannes Lingens - PLAY (Hitorri)
Alon Nechushtan - For Those Who Cross the Seas (ESP-Disk')
Quicksails (Ben Baker Billington) - Surface (Hausu Mountain)
Ian Power - Ave Maria: Variations on a Theme by Giacinto Scelsi - Anne Rainwater (Carrier)
Rahma Quartet - “Mercy is called down by Mercy to the last” Live (Meenna)
Mike Reed - The Separatist Party (We Jazz/Astral Spirits)
Cecyl Ruehlen - Sferics (Harmonic Ooze)
Angelica Sanchez - Nighttime Creatures (Pyroclastic)
Gil Sansón - Confirmation Bias (Full Spectrum)
Bill Seaman/Tim Diagram/Stephen Spera - The World Was Turning Before (laaps)
Rakhi Singh - Purnima (Cantaloupe Music)
Ben Sloan - Muted Colors Live (New Amsterdam)
Thollem/Ka - The Other Directions (Superpang)
Tiger Village (Tim Thornton) - The Celebration (Hausu Mountain)
Jeremy Udden - Wishing Flower (Sunnyside)
Taku Unami - bot box boxes (Erstwhile)
Ruiqi Wang - Subduing the Silence (Orchard of Pomegranates)
Caius Williams - Gwannach (Otoroku)
Miki Yui - Live at Ftarri (Ftarri)
John Zorn - Nothing Is As Real As Nothing (Tzadik)
Upcoming releases.
November 3
Cunningham/Shiroishi/Ackerley/Smith - [five lines indecipherable] (Profane Illuminations)
Anthony Gatto - Small Subversions - Karl Larson (Gold Bolus)
Manongo Mujica - Ritual sonoro para ruinas circulares (Buh)
Sam Newsome & Jean-Michel Pilc - Cosmic Unconsciousness Unplugged (somenewmusic)
Anthony Pirog - The Nepenthe Series, Vol. 1 (Otherly Love)
Silkroad Ensemble - Phoenix Rising (Silkroad Ensemble)
November 7
Various artists - Synthetic Bird Music (Mappa)
November 10
Joseph Bohigian - The Water Has Found Its Crack - performances by Clara Kim, Catherine Sandstet, Heidi Schneider, Alina Tamborini, Rob Cosgrove, Kate Dreyfuss, Sophia Sun, Tsung-Yu Tsai, Argus Quartet, and Ensemble Decipher (Other Minds)
Buck Nauseef (Tony Buck, Marc Nauseef) - Mongrels (Relative Pitch)
Celia Hollander - 2nd Draft (Leaving)
Áine O’Dwyer - Turning in Space (Blank Forms Editions)
omawi (Marta Warelis, Onno Govaert, Wilbert de Joode) - waive (Relative Pitch)
November 17
Niko-Matti Ahti - Looking for a Ruler (Dinzu Artefacts)
Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy - New Rudiment Candidates for Snare Drum (Dinzu Artefacts)
Evan Parker/Derek Bailey/Han Bennink - The Topography of the Lungs (Otoroku; vinyl repress)
Evan Parker/George Lewis - From Saxophone and Trombone (Otoroku; vinyl repress)
Evan Parker/Paul Lytton - Collective Calls (Urban) (Two Microphones) (Otoroku vinyl repress)
salad - Riverside Ishiyama (Dinzu Artefacts)
Joshua Van Tassel - The Recently Beautiful (Backward Music)
Spencer Zahn - Statues II (Cascine)
November 24
Louth Contemporary Music Society - FOLKS’ MUSIC - compositions by Cassandra Miller, Laurence Crane, and Linda Catlin Smith; performances by Chamber Choir Ireland/Paul Hillier and Esposito Quartet (Louth Contemporary Music Society)
Vostok (Fie Schouten, Vincent Courtois, Guus Janssen) - Remote Islands (Relative Pitch)
December 1
Chris Fischer-Lochhead - Wake Up the Dead - JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ben Roidl-Ward, Quince Ensemble (New Focus)
Steven Schick - Weather Systems II – Soundlines: On Language and the Land - compositions by Iannis Xenakis, Vivian Fung, George Lewis, Lei Liang, Frederic Rzewski, Vinko Globokar, Roger Reynolds, and Sarah Hennies (Islandia Music)
December 8
Douglas Boyce - The Bird Is an Alphabet - Robert Baker, Molly Orlando, Byrne:Kozar:Duo, Marlanda Dekine, counter)induction (New Focus)
December 22
Ben Richter - Aurogeny - Ben Richter, Koan Quartet, the Orogenies (Infrequent Seams)
January 26
Gui Duvignau - Live in Red Hook (Sunnyside)
Find many more upcoming releases in For the Record: The Master List.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.
Well, this was a LOT...several albums not otherwise known to me now need to be listened to - and two more podcasts! Information overload - and loving it!