A World of Sound Awaits

2022 Pulitzer Finalist Leilehua Lanzilotti releases debut composer / sound artist album on Innova Recordings featuring Sō Percussion and Longleash.

In conjunction with the nationally touring exhibition Lanzilotti co-curated, … Takaezu: Worlds Within, Lanzilotti produced this album of chamber and experimental sound art works that explore the resonance of Takaezu’s bronze bells and the playfulness of her ceramic rattles. Lanzilotti writes, “Growing up at The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, I remember Toshiko Takaezu’s ceramic works being the same size as I was—the greeting presence of one of her mahina, or moons, as you entered the museum.”

Longleash, bring for Toshiko to life with delicate timbres and expressive shaping of resonance. Sō Percussion breathes life to sending messages in their depth of listening. Through their long history of playing chamber music together as a group, there is a magical, spinning quality to the sound. In the resonance of the sky in our hands, our hands in the sky, we get the feeling of being inside Takaezu’s multisensory landscapes.

What She Wrote is a journey through the voices of powerful women writers who have shaped our literary landscape. Japanese-born composer Asuka Kakitani has created a musical bridge connecting her heritage with the timeless words of Emily Dickinson, Sappho, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and Akiko Yosano. Performed by the acclaimed Quince Ensemble, Kakitani’s compositions bring these voices to life, inviting listeners to explore the hidden influences of the women who came before us.

Kakitani was inspired by an article by Brigid Delaney, in which she wonders about the unexpressed talents and stories of her women ancestors. Delaney writes, “there wasn’t a lot of room back then to create beautiful things of your own. Imagination – that hinterland where ideas are born – needs acres of time, not just snatched minutes between cooking and cleaning.” This led Kakitani to wonder about her own Japanese women ancestors, whose unknown lives and creative voices are obscured by the passage of time. 

What She Wrote sings the words of women who defied the constraints of their eras to leave a lasting impact through their words. Kakitani constructs each composition as a dialogue with these writers. The first piece, a rendition of Dickinson’s “In This Short Life,” begins with a delicate refrain that swells to a powerful crescendo before gently receding, inviting us to contemplate the power we possess in these ephemeral moments we call life. “A Room of One’s Own” weaves Virginia Woolf’s powerful words that emphasize the necessity of personal space and financial freedom for women to fully realize their artistic potential. The album’s final piece begins with a vocalization that builds in tension until it ultimately erupts into Shelley’s bold declaration: “I am fearless and therefore powerful.” 

Asuka Kakitani’s deep love for nature inspires her to transform her vision into musical stories. Her mostly-programmatic music results from the inspiration evoked by her surroundings interweaved with her perspectives and imagination. Kakitani’s projects span jazz big bands, orchestras, chamber ensembles, and soloists. She has been described as “[a] musical impressionist and supreme colorist” (Hot House Magazine) and her music as “the overflowing world of inspirational melody” (DownBeat Magazine). Kakitani has been the recipient of several grants, fellowships, and awards, including the New Music USA Creator Fund, the Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab, the McKnight Composer Fellowship, the Jerome Fund for New Music Grant (ACF |create), American Music Center’s Composer Assistance Grants, the BMI Charlie Parker Jazz Composition Prize, Brooklyn Arts Council Grant, and Minnesota State Arts Board Grants.

Quince Ensemble is a treble voice quartet dedicated to changing the paradigm for contemporary vocal chamber music. Described as “the Anonymous 4 of new music” by Opera News, Quince continually pushes the boundaries of vocal ensemble literature. By performing almost exclusively the music of living composers, and actively commissioning works with a broad and curious aesthetic ear, they seek to create a landscape of contemporary vocal music that is embodied, complex, and expressive, with the musical boldness and virtuosity that is often reserved for instrumental groups.

As dedicated advocates of new music, Quince regularly commissions new works for voices, providing wider exposure for the music of living composers. In 2019, they launched the Quince New Music Commissioning Fund, a fund to grow the repertoire for women and treble voices. Through educational activities, Quince works to bring this music to a larger community of singers and listeners, offering new and empowering pathways to vocal excellence. Quince has released four studio albums, Realign the Time, Hushers, Motherland, and David Lang’s love fail, all available on iTunes, CD Baby, Spotify, Bandcamp, and Amazon. 

Consolation is a song cycle composed by Samn Johnson for vocalist Tis Kaoru Zamler-Carhart, setting Latin poetry from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. It features layers of Tis’s voice accompanied by Samn’s electronics and instrumental recordings. 

Boethius wrote the Consolation in 524 AD while awaiting execution after his political downfall. He is visited in prison by the feminine allegorical character of Philosophy. Through their imagined dialogue, it is apparent that both characters are in fact himself, both male and female, both free and captive, facing his own questions about his life choices: money, fame, power—did they make him happy?

Consolation—the album—has been described by composer and music critic Alex Temple as “wildly polystylistic,” but the same can perhaps be said of Boethius’s original. Its mix of poetry and prose carried ancient readers along in the visceral flow of Latin meter, careening between intellectual elegance and sheer terror. Samn’s music hews closely to the maelstrom of Boethius’s emotions, but renders it with different devices. Tis’s voice, the backbone of the album, is pushed to virtuosic limits of range and timbre, spanning over four octaves with an astonishing array of colors and tuning systems. Interviewed by WMBR radio about Samn’s writing for the trans nonbinary voice, Tis says: 

Around Tis’s voice, Samn’s electronic orchestra deploys echoes of Renaissance polyphony alongside 808 kick drums and synthesizers, flashes of romanticism, and washes of ambience. Early tuning systems—from Just Intonation to Meantone temperaments—are omnipresent in Samn’s music. For Boethius, who was also a music theorist, these would have not only been shimmering worlds of musical color, but allegories for how the cosmos is ordered. Perhaps the same is ultimately true for Samn, and is part of what binds him to Boethius across the centuries.

Describing this connection, Samn says, “When I first read the Consolation, it immediately drew me in. The practical philosophy felt so accessible, and the huge range of emotion and poetic rhythm was an exciting challenge to adapt. I knew this would push me to draw on a similar range of musical styles, and writing for Tis, whose voice transcends the gendered categories of classical vocal music, felt perfectly aligned with this aim. It’s also a vehicle to explore my religious and spiritual thoughts. We know from other sources that Boethius was a Christian, yet he does not evoke explicitly Christian concepts in his Consolation, instead describing God in the terms of neoplatonic philosophy. Whatever his intent may have been, I find this lack of doctrine to impart an appealing universality to his message, and is part of what makes me want to adapt it for the world I live in. In this text, written from prison, I find something transcendent and liberatory.” 

Samn Johnson(he/they) is a composer, producer, and historical linguist. Their work often harnesses research on acoustics and historical phonology to set texts in ancient languages like Latin, Old English, Hittite, and Gothic. Samn has written for a range of performers including Chromic Duo, Righteous GIRLS, and harpsichordist Nathan Mondry. His latest two recordings, both self-released, are Ageless Sea (2022), for chamber choir, chamber orchestra, electronics, and rock band, and First Book for Piano (2022), performing his own piano works. Samn is also half of the synth pop duo Acraea, together with Leora Mandel. He holds degrees in composition from the University of Michigan and NYU, and has taken courses in Indo-European historical linguistics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Samn lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where this album was recorded. (www.samnjohnsonmusic.com

Tis Kaoru Zamler-Carhart (they/them) is a singer, composer, writer, designer, visual artist, and medievalist. Tis regularly works with composers who write specifically for their voice. Tis’s own composition output includes opera, chamber. and vocal music, and has been performed around the world. Tis’s books are published by Punctum Books and revolve around Africa, Byzantium, and the fragile boundaries of seriousness (The Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and Parsons School of Design in New York.

The Electronic Lover, created by San Francisco Bay Area composer Lisa Mezzacappa and New York writer Beth Lisick, is an audio opera comprised of a nine-episode serial story set in 1980s chatrooms. The comedic drama features 14 vocalists, a synth-driven power trio, and special guests Del Sol Quartet and the Premier Ensemble of the San Francisco Girls Chorus.

The story is based on a 1985 article published in Ms. Magazine that described the thrilling, sordid dramas of an early online community created by a group of women techies who found a way to connect via the nascent chatroom community. Traversing many genres in the service of the storytelling, the music combines chamber art song with jazz improvisation, rock energy and experimental soundscapes. Operatic musical conventions converse with 1980s-era music technologies and pop culture references.

Berkeley, CA-based composer, improviser, bassist and producer Lisa Mezzacappa has been an active part of California’s vibrant music community for more than 20 years. Recent projects include Cosmicomics, a suite for electro- acoustic jazz sextet based on Italo’s Calvino’s stories about the origins of the cosmos; Organelle, a chamber work for improvisers grounded in scientific processes on micro and cosmic scales; Glorious Ravage, an evening-length song cycle for large ensemble and films drawn from the writings of Victorian lady adventurers; and Touch Bass, a collaboration with choreographer Risa Jaroslow for three dancers and three bassists. She is a recipient of the Pauline Oliveros New Genres Prize from the International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM), and has been commissioned by the San Francisco Girls Chorus and Del Sol Quartet.

Beth Lisick is a writer, actor and storytelling producer from the San Francisco Bay Area, currently living in New York. As an author, she has published six books including the New York Times best-selling comic memoir Everybody Into The Pool. Beth’s acting credits include a role on the Emmy-winning Amazon series Transparent and lead roles in numerous independent films screened at Cannes, Sundance, Tribeca and the San Francisco International Film Festival. She does voiceover work for museums, including the Smithsonian, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and SFMOMA.

Plastiglomerates is a collection of music exploring the theme of plastic in life. “Plastiglomerate” is a recently coined term used to describe a new geological phenomenon – Plastics which have been cemented into organic rock through geological processes. The new forms of plastic/rock combinations are often found on beaches and come in a bizarre and dazzling array of textures, shapes and colors. 

The term Plastiglomerate in the context of this collection of music is used as a metaphor – a way of describing the kinds of processes used to create the music, as well as the content, texture, and density of the sounds in it. As the term might suggest, this music collection contains a roughly-fused conglomeration of organic and inorganic sound, analog and digital, human and machine. 

This new work takes on the fears and hopes of technology’s relation to our own sense of human identity. With so many plastics in our bodies today, it might be worth asking ourselves if we are plastiglomerate too. How do I associate or dissociate or transcend these problematic relations to the artificial? Plastiglomerates is inspired by noise music like Melt Banana and Yasunao Tone; By experimental electronica like Eartheater, Little Snake and Tim Hecker; By the weirdnesses of Trout Mask Replica, by artists as different as Sun Ra and Arca and Darren McClure. 

The music is built from live improvised processing of existing material which, much like plastiglomerates, come from diverse sources, mostly different forms of corporate sound designed for consumption: Smooth jazz, pop music, random bits on the radio, prepackaged samples from Apple and other major audio software companies, etc. Some tracks consist entirely of computer-generated voices, by training a voice AI software on the music, effectively making this collection of music speak in its own voice, reciting processed sound poems. The main goal is to process and reprocess and reprocess again until it all coalesces. 

Jess Rowland is a New York City-based artist, musician, and composer. Much of her work explores the relationship between technologies, popular culture and other absurdities, investigating the weirdness of reality and how we all deal with it. In addition to her music and art practice, she works as an educator and advocate for new music.