Chase Elodia Announces 'Portrait Imperfect' Release

Biophilia Records is proud to present the debut release from Chase Elodia, a composer-drummer with a rising profile in New York's creative music communities. Informed by Elodia's readings of media theorists throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Portrait Imperfect centers on themes of digital selfhood and memory: how notions of ourselves and one another are transfigured by the way we share and gather information in an online ecosystem.

Elodia is joined by a cast of preeminent rising-star musicians on the New York scene to help sound out these ideas: Claire Dickson on voice, Theo Walentiny on keyboard and piano and Tyrone Allen on bass, with Morgan Guerin on Electronic Wind Instrument (EWI) for three tracks.

Biophilia label founder and acclaimed pianist Fabian Almazan states: "Chase Elodia has developed into a master of his instrument and possesses a distinct sound as a composer and arranger. It is our honor to be the home for his brilliant project."

Portrait Imperfect arrives on the heels of a bevy of critical acclaim for Elodia: ASCAP (Young Jazz Composer Award), Boulder Country Arts Alliance (Pathways to Jazz Grant), and the MacDowell Residency (Spring 2022 Fellow) have all recognized his work in recent years. His expansive creative vision takes cues from media theorists, singer-songwriters, jazz composers and poets. Portrait Imperfect captures that amalgam of influences, crystallizing themes that Elodia began to articulate in his widely read May 2020 essay for Music & Literature, "Keith Jarrett & Digital Culture."

Portrait Imperfect is notable for the way it foregrounds the voice, with Elodia's sensitive and insightful lyric writing taking center stage on most tracks. Dickson's singing, with its airy expressivity, has a way of guiding Elodia's creative ruminations throughout the album. "I love the drums, and most of my first musical heroes were drummers," says Elodia, "but I also have a deep and abiding love for language. I studied English literature in college in addition to music, and these days I find myself perhaps just as inspired by the writings of Fernando Pessoa, Jane Hirschfield and Natasha Shüll as I am by the drumming of Terri Lyne Carrington, John Hollenbeck and Deantoni Parks. For this project in particular, I was inspired by texts such as Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death, Susan Sontag's On Photography, and Byung Chul-Han's Good Entertainment, each of which provides a unique perspective on how we might conceptualize our digitally-mediated subjectivities"

These literary influences are apparent throughout Portrait Imperfect, in lyrical references to the "spotless decay" of digital archives, the "placeless modernity and pageantry" of social networking, and the "contingencies of salvation" that are woven into our productivity-obsessed culture.

"I'm continually asking questions about the affordances of digital technologies - both in regard to how we live our lives, but also in thinking about the role of music and art in our hyper-connected moment. In what ways do these technologies propagate an increasingly avaricious and materialist cultural disposition? And how, as musicians and artists, might we be able to both attend to and challenge that way of relating to the world?"

Based in Brooklyn, composer-drummer Chase Elodia has garnered critical acclaim since his move to New York in Fall 2019. In 2021 he received ASCAP's Young Jazz Composers Award for his song "The World Is Now Your Own," composed in honor of the birth of pianist Glenn Zaleski and violinist Tomoko Omura's child. In July 2020, he received a grant from the Boulder County Arts Association to record his forthcoming debut album Portrait Imperfect.

He was also awarded the MacDowell Artist Residency Fellowship for Spring 2022. In addition to his own projects, Chase has shared the stage with Emma Frank, Morgan Guerin and Allegra Krieger. He performs regularly with the Alex Hamburger Quartet and the ensemble Echoes. His writing has been published in Music & Literature, Drum! Magazine and the Percussive Arts Society.

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