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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
CD of Nick Dunston - COLLA VOCE (OOYH 027), featuring original artwork + design by TJ Huff (huffart.com). The CD for COLLA VOCE features an insert with liner notes by Nick Dunston, and additional art + design by TJ Huff. CDs will be in stock and shipping on or before release day. Limited to 500 copies. CD template is a placeholder image and will be updated soon.
Includes unlimited streaming of COLLA VOCE
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
What if the blue that I see is different from the blue that you see? This question is an infrastructure for my Afro-Surrealist Anti-Opera, COLLA VOCE. Often, when we think of Surrealism, we think of subconscious mental states, dreams, nightmares-those unexplored corners of our psyche. But Afro-Surrealism protests: what if that which one calls a ‘dream' is a nightmare to another? What if that which one calls ‘rational' is completely baseless to another? And surely, we must have varying ideas of what is ‘normal’. While many would consider the work of the great Frida Kahlo to be Surrealist, she herself said that she was simply painting her own reality. So who or what gets to determine the measuring stick for verisimilitude?
'Anti-Opera’ is not an outright rejection of a particular medium, but an audacity to confront it, and when necessary, to subvert and turn it inside-out. 'colla voce'-literally, ‘with the voice’. Moving with the voice, breathing with the voice, working together with the voice-all voices. Perhaps no other instrument is simultaneously understood and misunderstood as much as this one. There are four practitioners of it to whom I must express gratitude for the opportunity to work with directly: Cansu, Sofia, Isabel, and Friede- who not only (literally) breathed life into this work, but they being hyperpersonal creators in their own rights, immediately established themselves as the strands of DNA around which this music is built. Further gratitude goes to Tal, Maria, Anil, and Moritz-powerful instrumentalists, using their own inner voices to establish the necessary energy and tendons to bind together the overlap of cords and chords, both those in the larynx and those bound by wood. To JACK Quartet, who enabled me to cross even further into other dimensions by not simply adding, but exponentially multiplying resonance and mass, developing a sense of time that can be described as anything but linear, and entirely tangible. And to Weston, the producer of COLLA VOCE who sees the same blue that I see, entirely present in this province of collaboration since before I had even composed anything; no words can qualify their hand in shaping this work.
COLLA VOCE is a warped narrative of sorts, hurtling from acoustic universe to electric universe, string to scream, raw to produced, New York to Berlin, and of course: real to surreal. As a beckoning towards the libretto, it is largely inspired by writers: Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Ted Chiang, Richard Hugo, and Gabriel García Márques. Their works are fictitious, poetic, folkloric; genres that tend to uncover a potent emotional veracity. I continue to ask myself, how can we achieve this in the world of organized sound and noise, which is endless, diverse, and on beautiful occasions, Afro-Surreal? In other words-how is the Blues that I hear different from Blues that you hear?
-Nick Dunston, Chicago, January 8th, 2024
credits
released April 26, 2024
Nick Dunston - compositions, post-processing, double bass
JACK Quartet (Christopher Otto, Austin Wulliman - violins, John Richards - viola, Jay Campbell - cello)
Cansu Tanrıkulu - voice, live processing
Sofia Jernberg - voice
Isabel Crespo Pardo - voice
Friede Merz - voice
Maria Reich - violin, viola
Anil Eraslan - cello
Tal Yahalom - guitar
Moritz Baumgärtner - drums, percussion, megaphone
Produced by Weston Olencki
Session 1 engineered by Guy Sternberg at Emil Berliner Studios on December 9th and December 10th, 2022.
Session 2 engineered by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio on December 15th and 16th, 2022.
Mixed by Weston Olencki on November 14th, 2023.
Mastered by Eivind Opsvik at Greenwood Underground on November 28th, 2023.
Art + design by TJ Huff (huffart.com).
Special thanks to both The Shifting Foundation and JACK Studio, whose support was instrumental to the realization of COLLA VOCE.
Had been wanting to purchase something from Hollenbeck for years. Definitely one of my favorites for 2023. Have already listened to it 5 times in the last month. Nina's Dad 2022