Spacebomb Records & Trey Pollard Announce Live-Streamed Chamber Music Recording

As the co-owner and in-house arranger of Spacebomb Records, Trey Pollard (Natalie Prass, Foxygen, Helado Negro, Matthew E. White, S-Town podcast) has had an illustrious career of music creation, but he is now excited to announce his proper debut as a contemporary chamber composer. The first music from his forthcoming album Antiphone will debut in a live stream of the recording session at 1:30pm ET on Monday, May 14 from Montrose Recording in Richmond, VA. Not even Trey has heard the music yet -- this will be the first time a group of musicians has performed it, and the stream will allow the listener to hear the music as it's rehearsed, perfected and recorded. The recording is being produced by Matthew E. White and will be released later in the year by Spacebomb Records. More details on Antiphone are forthcoming.

The live stream will consist of the recording of two separate pieces with a 16-piece orchestra comprised of string players and a pianist, with Pollard at the helm as conductor. Viewers will take a rare, intimate front-row seat as Pollard conducts and instructs his players while they rehearse, and ultimately record, his debut compositions. It's not often that outsiders get such a close look inside the creative process of recording chamber music, especially not for a composer's anticipated debut. The entirety of the stream will last about 45 minutes.

About Trey Pollard:

To understand the composing and arranging world, lineage of learning is key-some subtleties of technique can only be passed from teacher to student in ways unreproducible through solitary study alone. Trey Pollard learned the art from Doug Richards, the renowned Duke Ellington scholar who founded a university Jazz Studies program in Richmond back in 1980. Richards is a brilliant composer, arranger and educator, a featured artist at the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian, and for what it's worth, was once invited to study with Nadia Boulanger, legendary guru of the 20th century classical scene. Richards espouses the view that jazz can be as artistically significant as classical music, placing Ellington Queen's Suite on the same pedestal as the works of Bach or Ligeti. Pollard has a perceptive ability to parse this history, to see his place in it, and draw structures and forms from various periods to inform his writing.

He is entering a new phase, completing a record of contemporary chamber pieces under his own name featuring a set of preludes and fugues for string quintet and pieces for chamber string orchestra and piano. He wrote within a systematic framework, a series of parallel harmonic planes, constellations of notes unburdened by the tension of standard chordal and melodic structures. Pollard's creative powers are at a certain fullness now, a ripeness matched to his age and his experience in various roles: producing in the recording studio, performing with ferocious skill on guitar, piano or pedal steel, conducting small ensembles or orchestras-often with the same group of musicians he has known for over a decade. As co-owner of Spacebomb Records, his work has been a cornerstone of productions by a growing list of rock and pop artists in the know, Natalie Prass, The Waterboys, Foxygen, Helado Negro, Matthew E. White and Bedouine, and expanded to projects outside that context, recently contributing to the score of S-Town, a groundbreaking longform podcast. The music of his mind is of such quality-agile and prescient, conceptual yet emotional, with an absorbing sense of beauty. Though he might not try to bring down the heavens, they swing low just the same. Pollard moves through the field of creation with surety, finding his own line on the thrill of sound.

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