Acclaimed Composer Bryan Senti Announces New Album 'Manu'

Critically acclaimed composer and violinist/violist Bryan Senti is set for the release of his new record Manu on June 24 via Naïve Records. Manu is the first crossover album for the classically trained Senti, a first-generation Cuban/Mexican- and Colombian-American, combining western neo-classical traditions with the Latin American folk music his parents grew up with.

In anticipation of the forthcoming record, Cool Hunting is debuting the album's title track "Manu" alongside a video featuring the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, recorded at Dreamland Recording Studios in New York's Hudson Valley and directed by Jared Malik Royal.

Unique among classical releases, the parts of Manu were recorded individually, enabling the record to be released in Dolby Atmos as well as with a traditional audio mix. This unusual recording process gave engineer Francesco Donadello a unique opportunity to push the mixes, creating an illusion of three-dimensionality that plays on the psychedelic character of the music.

"Since my journey to write and record Manu began at the beginning of the pandemic, the final recording is in fact the sum of many individual instrumental recordings taking place over the course of a year which help creates the record's unique and surreal vibe," explains Senti.

"That said, I wanted to show in this video that these pieces are string chamber pieces at their essence and that they are playable. I've known Clarice Jensen and many members of ACME for over a decade and it felt like a nice homecoming to be able to work with them on this. I was also very fortunate to collaborate with the director Jared M. Royal who understood how the record blended the traditional with the modern and was able to transpose this idea to a cold winter day in upstate New York."

In 2020, Senti turned 38 and had his first child. "When I thought about the stories that I wanted to impart to her, the things I wanted her to learn from me, I thought back on what things I had learned as a child, or wished I had learned," he says of writing Manu. "What I wished I had learned was an ability to cherish both a Hispanic and American identity equally."

Senti further describes the deeply personal nature of Manu and how the record traces both his path as well as that of his parents and ancestors.

He adds, "Before I had [my daughter] Nica, I was invited to take part in an ayahuasca ceremony by my Peruvian co-producer, Justin Moshkevich. It comforted me to know that these plants had come from a place not too far from where my mother was born. The word itself, ayahuasca, is a Hispanicization of the word Iowaska from Quechuan, a language my ancestors would have spoken. The shamanistic ceremony evoked a humble mysticism and was a powerful setting to intimate existential questions...One can feel like they're connecting the natural world with a transcendental one, and that's a feeling I wanted to suffuse in the music."

Bryan Senti is based in Los Angeles; recent collaborations include projects with Dustin O'Halloran and Peter Gregson for Deutsche Grammophon. His film and TV career began with Michael Almereyda's Experimenter in 2014 and since then he has worked on multiple films and TV shows including the BAFTA winning series "Save Me" (2021) by Lennie James. Currently he's scoring the BBC 3 musical "Mood" by Nicôle Lecky.

In addition to working on classical music, Senti's experimental pop project Ex Mykah is signed to the London-based Kowloon Records and his LP 16, 17 was released in 2018. He also collaborated with Mark Ronson on his production Carbon Life, performed by the Royal Ballet, and has toured and recorded for the Canadian singer-songwriter Feist.

Senti received a master's in music composition from The Yale School of Music in 2009.

Photo credit: Jacob Boll

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