The new album will be released on February, 23, 2024.
On Wednesday, January 24, 2024, William Brittelle, the Grammy-nominated Brooklyn-based composer and producer known as âa mercurial artist whose oeuvre embraces post-punk flamboyance, chamber music elegance, and much moreâ (The New Yorker) releases âDido's Lament (Revisited) - Single Edit' from his upcoming mini-album Alive in the Electric Snow Dream (February, 23, 2024) via New Amsterdam Records.
A companion piece to his recently Grammy-nominated âPsychedelics'Â for Roomful of Teeth (the two were written concurrently and share text), Alive in the Electric Snow Dream presents Brittelle's collage-like compositional style at its most extreme and enveloping. Every gesture erupts out of the previous one in a constantly evolving fever dream filled with a swirl of vintage synths, pop vocals, saxes, guitars, noise, screams, and strings outlining a dreamlike, first person apocalyptic vision..
Today, January 24, 2024, Brittelle releases âDido's Lament (Revisited) - Single Edit', a feminist retelling of the Dido and Aeneas myth anchored by Henry Purcell's famous aria "When I am Laid in Earth" (aka "Dido's Lament"). Originally premiered by Wild Up and Zola Jesus in January 2019 on the Ecstatic Music Festival, the single highlights the fiercely talented Holland Andrews, culminating in a truly cathartic, guttural vocal climax.Â
Developed and recorded during the pandemic with Metropolis Ensemble, Alive in the Electric Snow Dream features Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Bon Iver), Holland Andrews, and Eliza Bagg (Roomful of Teeth, Lisel) on vocals, Immanuel Wilkins on sax, Ben Cassorla on guitar, Paul Wiancko (Kronos Quartet, OWLS) on strings, Brad Balliett on distorted bassoon, and Brittelle on synthesizers, percussion, and electronics.
Alive in the Electric Snow Dream was mixed by Zach Hanson (Bon Iver, S. Carey), the Wisconsin-based mixing engineer responsible for Roomful of Teeth's Grammy-nominated Rough Magic and Spektral Quartet/Julia Holter/Alex Temple's Behind the Wallpaper, both produced by Brittelle and released last year.
William Brittelle is a Grammy-nominated Brooklyn-based composer, producer and creator of hyper-text and multimedia. An avid collaborator, Brittelle has worked with a number of artists across multiple disciplines, including Roomful of Teeth, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Bryce Dessner (The National), Son Lux, Oneohtrix Point Never, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (Sammus), Aditya Prakash, Shahzad Ismaily, Duran Duran, Wye Oak, David Longstreth (Dirty Projectors), Kanye West, and the Seattle, Baltimore, Indianapolis, and North Carolina Symphony Orchestras, the Basel Sinfonietta, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
His most recent full-length LP entitled Spiritual America featuring Wye Oak, the Metropolis Ensemble, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, was released by Nonesuch/New Amsterdam in 2019. His prior albums were profiled on NPR's All Things Considered and in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, MUSO, The Nation, and The New Yorker.
Brittelle's work has been presented at venues across the world, including the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Teatro ColĂłn in Buenos Aires, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Da Camera in Houston, Seattle's Town Hall, and the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York.
Post-pandemic, his work has focused increasingly on complex collaborative networks of interlinked text and multimedia, a trend culminating in the launch of Eternal September, a vast digital alternate reality artistic platform being developed with the support of the Brown Arts Institute. Increasingly active as a producer, upcoming and recent projects include albums with Alex Temple/Julia Holter/Spektral Quartet, Metropolis Ensemble/Wye Oak, composer Missy Mazzoli, vocalist/percussionist Jodie Landau, the string ensemble Owls, singer/composer Aditya Prakash, movement and voice ensemble Constellation Chor, and keyboardist Erika Dohi. Roomful of Teeth's 2023 album Rough Magic garnered Brittelle Grammy-nominations both as composer (BEST CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL COMPOSITION) and producer (BEST SMALL ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE).
Along with composers Judd Greenstein and Sarah Kirkland Snider, Brittelle is the co-founder and co-artistic director of New Amsterdam Records and serves as house producer for Shahzad Ismaily's Figureight Recordings in Brooklyn.
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