View Album Trailer Below:
“[Mazzoli is] Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart.” Time Out NY
“[Mazzoli is] one of the more surprising and inventive composers
now working in New York” – The New York Times
now working in New York” – The New York Times
“Is Victoire’s music post-rock, post-mimimalist or pseudo-post-pre-modernist indie-chamber-electronica? It doesn’t particularly matter. It’s just good music.” – NPR
New Amsterdam Records is proud to announce Vespers For A New Dark Age, the new record from composer Missy Mazzoli, in collaboration with her ensemble Victoire, Glenn Kotche (of Wilco), synth producer Lorna Dune and virtuosic vocalists Mellissa Hughes, Martha Cluver and Virginia Warnken (of Roomful of Teeth). Vespers will see its release on March 31, 2015. To preview the album, the ensemble has released a trailer that depicts a rehearsal taking place in Mazzoli’s Brooklyn apartment while she explains her inspirations for the album. The trailer is available to stream or embedHERE.
Over two years in the making, the record reimagines the traditional vespers prayer service and replaces the customary sacred verses with poems by Matthew Zapruder that contend with themes like technology, God and more. Mazzoli set out to create a more modern version of the vespers service, on her own terms, to explore the intersection of our modern technological age with the archaic formality of religious services. Vespers is meant to beg questions of its listeners — What haunts us in this “new dark age”? What role does ritual play in our lives? Is there room for the supernatural in an increasingly technological world?
On Vespers, acoustic movements that feature timbres spanning the sonic spectrum — from delicate violin runs and lush synth pads to soaring operatic vocals and pulsating percussion — alternate with three purely electronic interludes, where Mazzoli combines her compositional skills with forward-thinking remixing and sampling techniques. These interludes, finessed by electronic producer Lorna Dune, are meant to capture the elements of the compositions that came before them on the record as well as hint at themes to come, solidifying the tracks into a singular, streamlined body of work. Vespers also includes “A Thousand Tongues, feat. Deidre Muro of Savoir Adore (Lorna Dune Remix)“, a re-imagining of a Mazzoli composition that was recently deemed “the most striking and uncanny music Victoire has ever made” by Pitchfork.
The group’s eclectic instrumentation of strings, clarinet and synthesizers has been expanded to include a large pallet of electronic sounds and junk percussion, complemented by Kotche, whose massive drumset included three sets of crotales, glockenspiel, and a seemingly endless battery of cymbals. The vocalists often sing in quasi-baroque harmonies that glided over this landscape of percussion and synths, only to collapse into a haunting solo line.
Victoire is: Olivia De Prato (violin), Eileen Mack (clarinet), Lorna “Dune” Krier and Missy Mazzoli (keyboards, electronics), Eleonore Oppenheim (double bass), Mellissa Hughes (voice). Vespers was commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered there by Victoire, Glenn Kotche and Lorna Dune in February 2014.
Mazzoli drew on her experience writing operas, vocal and chamber music to create Vespers, while also expanding on the singular musical territory of Victoire’s debut release Cathedral City, deemed one of 2010’s best classical albums by NPR, The New Yorker and Time Out New York.
Vespers For A New Dark Age tracklist:
1. Wayward Free Radical Dreams
2. Hello Lord
3. Interlude 1
4. Come On All You
5. New Dark Age
6. Interlude 2
7. Machine
8. Postlude
Upcoming shows:
2/5 – Missy Mazzoli Composer Portrait @ Miller Theatre – New York, NY
3/22 – Meredith Monk & Friends @ Carnegie Hall – New York, NY #
5/7 – Le Poisson Rouge (CD Release Party) – New York, NY %
5/9 – Walker Arts Center (Liquid Music Series) – Minneapolis, MN %
5/10 – Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center – Cincinnati, OH %
# – Missy Mazzoli & Victoire
% – Missy Mazzoli & Victoire w/Glasser & Noveller
