New Amsterdam Records is excited to share a full album stream for Sarah Kirkland Snider's highly-anticipated Unremembered, due September 4, 2015.
The stream premiered via PopMatters, which stated: "Unremembered is just as enthralling in its musical flow as its lyrical narrative, and the way Snider guides, teases, and manipulates the listener is masterful. It's a stunning, immensely rewarding experience..."
The album trailer for Unremembered is available to stream below, and the album is available for pre-order here!
To celebrate the release of the record, an album release show will be held next Thursday, September 3 at the DiMenna Center's Cary Hall. The show will feature intimate new arrangements performed by Shara Worden, DM Stith, Timo Andres (piano), Beth Hussein Meyers (viola), Nuiko Wadden (harp), Taylor Levine (guitar), and Adam Sliwinski (conductor), plus an opening set by DM Stith (with Aaron Roche). The performance will be accompanied by multimedia projections of Nathaniel Bellows' haunting visual art that inspired the cycle. There will also be an unveiling of a stunning new video for "The River" by acclaimed music video director Dan Huiting and cinematographer Andre Durand, and a Q&A conversation hosted by NewMusicBox's Molly Sheridan with Snider, Bellows, Worden, and Stith about the collaboration. More info and tickets here.
Four years in the making, the studio recording of Unremembered, featuring vocalists Padma Newsome (Clogs), DM Stith, and Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond), and the Unremembered Orchestra (members of ACME, Alarm Will Sound, ICE, The Knights, So Percussion) and conducted by Edwin Outwater (Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, San Francisco Symphony) will be released September 4, 2015 on CD, 2xLP, and limited-edition white vinyl 2xLP.
A meditation on memory, innocence, and the haunted grandeur of the natural world, Unremembered recalls strange and beautiful happenings experienced during a childhood in rural Massachusetts: a houseguest takes sudden leave in the middle of the night; a boy makes a shocking discovery on a riverbank; a girl disappears in woods behind a ranging farm; ghosts appear with messages for the living. Through Bellows's moving words and images and Snider's vivid, fraught, astonishing score, the cycle explores the ways in which beguiling events in early life can resonate in -- and prepare us for -- the subtler horrors that lie beyond the realm of childhood.
Unremembered is the highly-anticipated follow-up album to Snider's widely-acclaimed 2010 song cycle Penelope, which was named the "year's most affecting creation" by Time Out New York (Top Classical Album of 2010) and praised in countless other publications, including Pitchfork ("No matter what perspective you bring to this album, it bears profound rewards"), the New York Times ("rapturous"), the LA Times ("haunting...piercing melancholy"), and NPR, who named Penelope one of "The 5 Best Genre-Defying Albums of 2010."
Employing a broader instrumental and temperamental palette than she used for Penelope, Unremembered again demonstrates Snider's mastery of both lyric and narrative line and the arsenal of tools she uses to layer, contrast, weave, and construct her ideas. It is work that explores restraint and tumult, the argument of the heart and the mind, vast atmospheric expansiveness, and the myriad territories of intimacy.
Produced by Lawson White and Sarah Kirkland Snider, Unremembered was mixed by GRAMMY Award-winning mixer Andrew Scheps and mastered by GRAMMY Award-winning mastering engineer Chris Bellman. Sound design was created by Michael Hammond (No Lands), Lawson White, and Sarah Kirkland Snider. Both LP and CD formats include hand-drawn illustrations by Nathaniel Bellows and original artwork by DM Stith.Unremembered Track List:
1. Prelude
2. The Estate
3. The Barn
4. The Guest
5. The Slaughterhouse
6. The Girl
7. The Swan
8. The Witch
9. The River
10. The Speakers
11. The Orchard
12. The Song
13. The Past
Videos