LOADBANG: PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS Out September 10 on New Focus

The acclaimed ensemble loadbang, described by The New Yorker as "an eccentric quartet that has had to generate its entire repertoire from nothing," further expands its sonic horizons on its latest album, Plays Well With Others, released Friday, September 10 on New Focus.

True to the title, Jeffrey Gavett (baritone voice), Andrew Kozar (trumpet), William Lang (trombone) and Adrián Sandí (clarinet) are joined by a 12-piece string orchestra in new works by Eve Beglarian, Taylor Brook, Reiko Füting, Paula Matthusen, Heather Stebbins, and Scott Wollschleger, who have previously written for the group.

Their compositional approaches are varied and fascinating, keeping the four-headed creature that is loadbang at the center while using the strings to provide a sonic environment, commentary, and an expanded sound palette. The resulting pieces range from abstract soundscapes to wild theatrical vignettes, drawing on loadbang's exceptional virtuosity and versatility.

The orchestra is notable in itself, a constellation of new music specialists that includes concertmaster Chris Otto (JACK Quartet), violinist Conrad Harris (String Noise), cellist Mariel Roberts, and other leading players. Eduardo Leandro conducts.

To celebrate the release of Plays Well With Others, loadbang will perform at OPERA America's Marc A. Scorca Hall on Saturday, September 25 at 12 pm. The program at National Opera Center (333 Seventh Ave, NYC) will include earlier works by the album's composers and the premiere of a new video by R. Luke Dubois to Eve Beglarian's track, You See Where This Is Going. Tickets are $20, available through Eventbrite; admission includes a copy of the album. Proof of vaccination will be required to attend. The event will also be streamed at loadbang's YouTube channel. Note: the orchestra will not appear on this concert.

Plays Well With Others was produced and recorded by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio. It is loadbang's sixth album under its own name, and its third for New Focus Recordings.

Says Jeffrey Gavett, "The idea of loadbang and strings goes back to a 2014 collaboration with Reiko Füting and String Orchestra of Brooklyn. We loved Reiko's string music and his loadbang piece from back in 2010, so we were excited to see what he'd do by putting the two together. It's a great expansion of possibilities - we end up in a quasi-concerto grosso world, sometimes as orchestra members, sometimes as soloists."

The album opens with Taylor Brook's Tarantism, in which he sets 16th and 17th century Italian texts on treating a tarantula bite (this practice was the origin of the tarantella). Brook establishes loadbang as the musician/doctor, with Gavett providing a mix of dramatic narrative context, specific instructions for treatment, and incantations. Meanwhile the strings channel the patient's waves of pain and disorientation in dense dissonant string harmonies, the frenzy of ritualistic dancing in cathartic tutti gestures, and post-treatment weariness in undulating, creaking harmonics.

On Riven, Heather Stebbins weaves electronics into a wide-ranging timbral texture, blurring the line between man-made and computer-generated sounds. If Brook established a dichotomy between the four voices in loadbang and the strings to serve a narrative purpose, Stebbins strives to expand the hybrid instrument to include the new sounds within one dynamic organism. Riven journeys through fragile, fricative sounds, poignant sighs in the strings, and tightly woven electro-acoustic mechanisms.

In her You See Where This Is Going, Eve Beglarian sets a text by Brendan Constantine that investigates the dissonance between the names of things and their essence. Percolating pizzicati in the strings set up chordal sonorities in the winds to close the brief phrases, while Gavett sings melismatic lines. Eventually those roles reverse, as more sustained harmonies in the strings are set off by stuttering winds. Gavett delivers Constantine's final lines on an elegiac note: "you imagine hiding when the world finds out you're not who you've said."

Reiko Füting's music integrates quotation, evocative non-pitched sounds, and visceral gestures into a texture that develops material through varied repetition. Named for a series of sculptures by American artist Dan Flavin, mo(nu)ment for C/palimpsest was written in reaction to the attack on the Charlie Hebdo publication in 2015; its whispered texts evoke the slogan "I am Charlie Hebdo" in three fragments: "Je suis," "Ich bin," and "I am." Initially austere, the texture grows from hushed rhythmic utterances into multi-timbral mechanisms, as brief repeated gestures evolve to form a hypnotic setting in which to contemplate the many angles of "I am."

Scott Wollschleger's CVS examines the way banal and emotionally-charged thoughts can simultaneously occupy the same space in our minds. Three verbal phrases alternate as quotidian mantras: "CVS," "There's been a terrorist attack," and "Cool graphics." Gavett turns the title phrase inside out, mining its three letters for multiple shades of meaning by shifting emphasis and vocal inflection. Ironically, while "CVS" and "There's been a terrorist attack" seem to occupy a similar disembodied expressive space, it is the phrase "Cool graphics" that receives the grandeur of majestic octaves in the ensemble.

The final work on the album, Paula Matthusen's Such is Now the Necessity, takes full advantage of the expanded sonorous potential of the loadbang plus strings format. Layered, overlapping lines create expansive harmonies evocative of Renaissance polyphony, as heard in a church where lengthy reverberation creates unexpected verticalities. Midway through the work, the wind articulations shorten into passages of enlivened repeated notes and the strings play flowing passagework, creating a heroic antiphonal dialogue that surrounds Gavett's soaring vocal line.

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