First Single From David T. Little's BLACK LODGE 'My Childhood' Out Now

"My Childhood," the first single from composer David T. Little's modern opera Black Lodge, is available now from Cantaloupe Music on all digital services. Featuring libretto by celebrated poet Anne Waldman and performances by Timur and the Dime Museum and Isaura String Quartet, Black Lodge is set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, where a tormented writer (identified as the "Man") confronts demons of his own making in search of escape. With music and libretto created first, Black Lodge was later reverse-engineered into an episodic art film by director Michael Joseph McQuilken and Beth Morrison Projects, which premiered at Opera Philadelphia's Festival O22 in October 2022.

"I think this is a piece that everybody can have their own experience with," Little says. "As an audience, you have to meet this piece halfway - engage with it on its terms, and let it tell you what it's got to tell you. And that will be different for everybody."

In the first single, "My Childhood," we find an off-kilter sense of empathy and connection with Black Lodge's tortured protagonist, voiced by Timur. This haunting yet spellbinding track - channeling and quoting filmmaker David Lynch - mixes a mournful sense of longing with an undercurrent of dread, as though at any moment a rift could open up and swallow the Man whole. The sense of foreboding peaks as a menacing, disembodied voice (also Timur) suddenly growls the words "Look closer: pitch oozing out. Always pitch underneath. Millions of red ants crawling all over. Look closer." Our connection with Timur's character sharpens as our shared dread opens a window into the dark forces arrayed against him.

Drawing on the complex mythologies of such artists as William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch) and David Lynch (Twin Peaks), Black Lodge fuses industrial metal and punk with classical string quartet and opera to create something wildly vivid and new. Writing on the premiere of the art film adaptation, The New York Times' Zachary Woolfe commented that "...the music embraces Little's longstanding interest in the grittier side of pop, the dark, pounding industrial 'nu metal' style of (I'll date myself) Slipknot, Korn and System of a Down." Others will pick up influences ranging from Nine Inch Nails and The Cure to Monteverdi, Mozart, and Mahler.

While Black Lodge echoes the dark, existential feel of previous David T. Little projects - Dog Days, Haunt of Last Nightfall, Soldier Songs - this new work pursues a new element that Little describes in his album notes. "I was seeking something beautiful in Black Lodge," he writes, "though deep down I still believed Burroughs' notion that 'you have to live in hell to see heaven.' I now see that I had both written myself into and out of that hell. In going through it, I found a new and healthier way of being that I didn't consciously know I was seeking - a resolution the Man in Michael Joseph McQuilken's artful screenplay is not granted."

About David T. Little

David T. Little is "one of the most imaginative young composers" on the scene (The New Yorker), with "a knack for overturning musical conventions" (The New York Times). His operas Dog Days, JFK, and Vinkensport (librettos by Royce Vavrek), and Soldier Songs have been widely acclaimed, "prov[ing] beyond any doubt that opera has both a relevant present and a bright future" (The New York Times). A new film version of Soldier Songs, created for the Opera Philadelphia Channel, was nominated for both a 2022 GRAMMY Award in the Best Opera Recording category and a 2022 International Opera Award for Digital Opera. The debut recording of Little's oratorio AM I BORN was listed among the best recordings of 2022 by Opera News.

In fall 2022, Little's latest film opera Black Lodge - written with Anne Waldman, starring Timur & the Dime Museum, and directed by Michael Joseph McQuilken - received its live premiere with film screening as part of Opera Philadelphia's Festival O22 and the 2022 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Upcoming projects include the choral opera SIN-EATER, for The Crossing, Donald Nally, conductor, and the Ragazze Quartet, directed by Jorinde Keesmaat, premiering in 2023, and the monodrama What Belongs to You (based on Garth Greenwell's celebrated novel) for GRAMMY-winning tenor Karim Sulayman and Alarm Will Sound, premiering in 2024. Little is also developing a new work commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera / Lincoln Center Theater new work program. His music has been presented by Carnegie Hall, Park Avenue Armory, Holland Festival, BAM Next Wave, LA Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Opéra de Montréal, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the LA Philharmonic.

From 2014 to 2017, Little was composer-in-residence with Opera Philadelphia and Music-Theatre Group. He has previously served as Executive Director of the MATA Festival and on the board of directors at Chamber Music America, and currently chairs the composition department at Mannes - The New School. The founding artistic director of the ensemble Newspeak, his music can be heard on New Amsterdam, Innova, Sono Luminus, Pentatone, Bright Shiny Things, and National Sawdust Tracks labels. Little received a 2023 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and is a recipient of the Copland House Residency Award. He is published by Boosey & Hawkes. Learn more at www.davidtlittle.com.

About Anne Waldman

Poet, performer, librettist, curator, professor and cultural activist Anne Waldman is the author of more than 60 volumes of poetry, poetics and anthologies including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press), which won the Pen Center Literary Prize. Her other titles include Manatee/Humanity, Gossamurmur and Trickster Feminism, all published by Penguin. Her album SCIAMACHY, released in 2020 by Fast Speaking Music and the Levy-Gorvy Gallery, has been described by Patti Smith as "exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our times."

Waldman helped found The Poetry Project at St Mark's Church In-the-Bowery, where she worked for a decade as director - leading to the launch of an ongoing home and Mimeo Publishing empire for the most avant garde poetry and poetics, including the New York School, the Beat Literary Generation and Black Mountain lineages. Waldman also co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa University. In addition, she was keynote speaker for the Bob Dylan and the Beats Conference in Tulsa in the Spring of 2022. She wrote the libretto for the critically acclaimed opera/movie Black Lodge with music by composer David T. Little, which premiered at Opera Philadelphia in October 2022.

Waldman has collaborated with Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Thurston Moore, James Brandon Lewis, choreographer Douglas Dunn and painter Pat Steir, as well as her family band: Fast Speaking Music with Devin Brahja Waldman and Ambrose Bye. Publishers Weekly has called her a "counter-cultural giant." Waldman is most recently the author of Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press, 2023) and co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat, 2022). In a review of Waldman's Bard, Kinetic in the Poetry Foundation journal, reviewer Nick Sturm wrote: "Waldman is one of the most important and irreducible living American poets."

About Timur

Kazakh-American singer Timur, "the extravagantly transgressive tenor, dangerous and seductive" (LA Times), has made solo appearances with the LA Philharmonic, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Comédie de Genève, Sarasota Opera, Utah Opera, Santa Cecilia Academy, LA Opera, Nouvel Opéra Fribourg, Müpa Budapest, Hawaii Opera Theater and the Industry LA, among others. He premiered over thirty operatic works, collaborating with composers, including Thomas Adès, David Lang, Evan Ziporyn, Michael Gordon, Silvano Bussotti, Ellen Reid, David T. Little, Gerald Barry, Mohammed Fairouz, Louis Andriessen, Anne LeBaron, the late Gian-Carlo Menotti, Peter Eötvös, Tobias Picker, Kate Moore and Nick Urata of DeVotchKa.

His band Timur and the Dime Museum, "a punk-operatic spectacle" (LA Times), have performed on America's Got Talent; REDCAT Gala with Jack Black, and the PROTOTYPE Festival. In 2014, the band premiered an environmental rock-opera Collapse, by Daniel Corral, produced by long-time collaborator Beth Morrison Projects, with shows at Redcat Theater, Miami Light Project, Operadagen Rotterdam and BAM 2015 Next Wave Festival. His upcoming solo projects are The Great Soviet Bucket, about his Soviet upbringing, for Miami Light Project directed by Emmy-nominated Sandra Powers, and rock-opera film Black Lodge by Grammy-nominated David T. Little for Opera Philadelphia. In 2023, he will premiere Klaus From Space, a sci-fi cabaret about Klaus Nomi, at O. Festival Rotterdam, commissioned by Klanggg Focus_Musiktheater Switzerland.

Timur is a co-creator of Silent Steppe Cantata by Anne LeBaron, a large-scale project between arts organizations of Kazakhstan and the United States. He closely collaborates with Brookledge Follies, a secret vaudevillian performance series in LA, curated by Erika Larsen of the Magic Castle. His voice is featured on the Hollywood soundtrack of Ruby Sparks and Hulu's The Great, and he appeared as a soloist on recordings released by Naxos USA, Milan Records, Nonesuch, Deutsche Grammophon and ANTI-. Timur is a producer of Clemency, a Sundance 2019 winning drama (starring Alfre Woodard), Richard Stanley's sci-fi horror Color Out of Space (starring Nicholas Cage), and a thriller Measure of Revenge (starring Melissa Leo and Bella Thorne.) Learn more at www.theoperaoftimur.com.

About Timur and the Dime Museum

Timur and the Dime Museum first came together on America's Got Talent, where they performed a Klaus Nomi cover, Total Eclipse, with the legendary songwriter Kristian Hoffman joining on keys. From there, they have built a reputation for fusing sounds with fierceness and theatricality. Originally an acoustic outfit of operatic voice, clarinet, viola, cello, guitar, accordion and banjo, the band later transformed into an ensemble of electric bass (David Tranchina), electric guitar (Matthew Setzer), keys (Daniel Corral) and drums (Andrew Lessman).

After their official debut on the prestigious ALOUD series in LA, T&DM toured the U.S., opening for bands Tiger Lillies, Mucca Pazza, The Red Paintings and DeVotchKa. They were discovered by Beth Morrison Projects during Crescent City, the first project of the Industry LA. Other highlights include their performance of Artaud in the Black Lodge by David T. Little as part of LA Philharmonic's Liederabend 21c, op. LA at Walt Disney Concert Hall; as well as appearances at Redcat Theater Gala with Jack Black, New York City's Joe's Pub, Operadagen Rotterdam and the Krampus LA Festival Ball. The band's repertoire includes multiple songs and operas composed by T&DM member Daniel Corral - among them Zoophilic Follies at NOW Festival at Redcat Theater, and COLLAPSE, an environmental Requiem, produced by BMP in collaboration with Victor Wilde of the Bohemian Society and video artist Jesse Gilbert. Commissioned by Redcat Theater, COLLAPSE has been performed at Miami Light Project, Operadagen Rotterdam Festival, Showcase@CSUSB and the renowned BAM 2015 Next Wave Festival. Learn more at https://www.timurandthedimemuseum.com.

About Isaura String Quartet

The LA-based Isaura String Quartet has established a reputation as progressive disruptors; an ensemble that pushes boundaries while staying true to their mission of promoting contemporary chamber music through live performance, workshops, and collaborative projects with composers and interdisciplinary artists. ISQ's practice is centered around music, community, and developing systems to support and examine the spaces in which they work. Recent and upcoming collaborators include Alex Temple, Carmina Escobar, Charles Gaines, Sean Griffin, David T. Little, Gloria Coates, Kitty Brazelton, Laura Steenberge, Sarah Hennies, and Ulrich Krieger. ISQ also prioritizes new pieces through their programming, supporting the work of emerging composers.

Recent projects include ISQ Workshop, free remote workshops for anyone interested in writing for strings who might not otherwise have access to a string quartet; Black Lodge, an opera film with Timur and the Dime Museum, composed by David T. Little and produced by Beth Morrison Projects; Binary Complex: Tonal Duet, a durational algorithmic composition and exhibition by artist David Schafer at Royale Projects; The Planes of Your Location, a concert and upcoming recording of new string works by Kitty Brazelton; hum and Machines & Strings, featured concerts at REDCAT curated by the quartet; and an upcoming recording of Ulrich's Krieger's noise metal string quartet, Up-Tight II. In addition to ISQ's work in experimental and contemporary art music, they have performed and recorded with artists including Man Man, Baths, Jherek Bischoff, Demi Lovato, and the All-American Rejects. Learn more at http://isaurastringquartet.com/.

Black Lodge Tracklist

David T. Little/Anne Waldman - Black Lodge
1. Magic Pain [1:51]
2. Electric Cerberus [6:09]
3. Punishment Deserved [7:17]
4. My Childhood [5:26]
5. The Hungry Ghost who Sings in Lamentation [3:51]
6. The Strange Light in the Lodge [2:38]
7. Premonition of the Worm [0:31]
8. You Find a Severed Ear in a Field [4:17]
9. Petrograd, 1917 [4:45]
10. Here, my Severed Digit (part 1) [2:05]
11. Here, my Severed Digit (part 2) [3:52]
12. The Warring Gods [2:27]
13: A Theory of Puncture [4:20]
14. Introduction to the God Realm of the Shamans [1:07]
15. Old Shaman on the Wheel [5:21]
16. Coming at You through Frames of Sleep [6:42]

Total time: 1:02:39

Album Credits

Soundtrack produced by David T. Little & Andrew McKenna Lee
Edited and mixed by Andrew McKenna Lee at Still Sound Music, East Chatham, NY
Mastered by Reuben Cohen at Lurssen Mastering, Burbank, CA
Recorded by Jim Lang, Knobworld, Los Angeles, CA and Tommy Simpson, Macroscopik Studios, Los Angeles, CA
Additional recording by: Matthew Setzer, David Tranchina, Daniel Corral, Andrew McKenna Lee, Michael Joseph McQuilken, David T. Little
Film originally produced by Beth Morrison Projects
Executive Producers: Beth Morrison and Thurston Moore

*Photo courtesy of Beth Morrison Projects

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