With a broad-minded view and an artist-friendly approach, non-profit label New Amsterdam has been a beacon in the independent music world. Dedicated to spotlighting new composers, the label sets no boundaries on what kind of music those composers create, whether it’s classical music, jazz, electronic music, avant pop, or any combination of those. That gives it a catalog incomparable to anyone else, and has made it a platform for artists that don’t consider molds when they step into the studio. Here’s a sweep through some recent NA releases.
Keyboardist Gideon Broshy already has credits with folks like Sō Percussion, Roomful of Teeth, and Wendy Eisenberg on his CV, so he’s no novice. But his debut album Nest rolls with the kind of willful naivety that comes from an artist fully confident in his vision and unconcerned by how many people grok it. Adding MIDI electronics and synth sounds to an ensemble of clarinet, dulcimer, and drums, Broshy produces skittering pieces that sound made by harpsichords on acid. Though the influence of composers like Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Richard D. James is pretty clear, Broshy filters those tones through his own twenty-first century mindscape that makes “Slash,” “Stutter,” and the marvelous “Plateus” sound like transmissions from a distant planet. Nest takes some real effort on the part of listeners not aligned with music that challenges the standard model of keys, tempos, and timbres, but hang in there – by the end of the album it starts to make a weird kind of sense.
A music professor at Princeton, composer Juri Seo is a Guggenheim fellow and the recipient of a Library of Congress Koussevitzky Commission. Working with sextet Latitude 49, she presents her latest work Obsolete Music, a misnomer if there ever was one. The song cycle hints as older forms of music that no longer feel relevant in our technology-obsessed century, including early music, baroque music, and even jazz. But the music never sounds anything less than contemporary. “Ostinato” swings hard, with drums standing alongside horns on center stage, while “Cantus Firmus” flows like a molasses dirge, oboe and bass clarinet leading the way to a pipe organ finale. “Rondeau” leads with harpsichord enhancing its olde worlde melody, while “Fugue” sets its clarinet and piano somewhere in nineteenth century Europe. While betraying a certain sense of humor, Seo’s borrowings work as foundations, not homages – setting the scene for her sense of melody and harmony to break free.
A member of Ireland’s forward-thinking chamber music group Crash Ensemble, bassist Caiman Gilmore clearly doesn’t think of music in terms of category. His first EP BlackGate captures a song cycle that veers between gentle genre-switch to stylistic crash and roll. “MVE I” and “MVE II” layer droning arco bass and cello over steady harp pulsing, lulling us into a false sense of security. But the segues in between frequently smash the chamber sounds into synthesizer noise (duly noted as a Yamaha DX7 – the sound of the eighties), startling your ears awake. There’s no sloppiness here – everything is deliberate, whether screeching or soothing. If the tunes sometimes sound more like sketches that fully fleshed out works, there are still enough alluring sonics to encourage keeping ears out for the next time Gilmore steps out on his own.
Saxophonist/keyboardist/composer Travis LaPlante was last heard on New Amsterdam with his band Battle Trance and the remarkable LP Green of Winter. For the accurately-titled String Quartets, he teams up with acclaimed chamber foursome JACK Quartet for a two-part, four-movement set of lush tones and subtly unfolding melodies. Unfurling like a waking dream, “Quartet 1, Pt. 2” starts off creamy and undulating, but evolves into a shiny drone of harmony, before settling into an off-kilter swirl – a wide lake of sixteen-string sound. “Quartet 2” folds in even more melodies, from urgent, even frantic slides through the air to warm, comforting blankets of harmony. LaPlante’s melodies catch the ear without making it too easy, and the JACKs know exactly when to caress and when to pinch the music’s skin. Tension-filled and gorgeous, String Quartets begs for a volume two.
A survivor of his father’s cult, Gen Morigami – trading under the name Essvus – confronts his pain and recovery head on with What Ails You. There are a lot of roiling feelings behind an experience such as his, and his music reflects that. EDM meets psychedelic guitar meets harsh noise meets Pink Floydian atmospherics, with the resulting orgy choreographed by Ableton Live. The angry churn of “Inner Violence,” the whiplash sound waves of the ironically titled “Warmth,” and the seething menace of “Moldsporing” embody the emotional conflict, chaotic depression, and brooding paranoia of a mind grappling with learning that everything it thought it knew is a lie. But calmer, dreamier tunes like “Anesthetic Midnight,” tentative smilers like “Counterfactuals,” and defiant bangers like “Hell and High Water” offer glimmers of hope, asserting that these particular bastards, as insidious as they are, will never get Essvus down. Not every mental health crisis needs to end in tragedy, after all.
Songwriter and cellist Zeelie Brown swims in waters more eclectic than their fellows on New Amsterdam on the apocalypse is not the end but the unveiling. The falsetto balladry of “gossamer” and the African rhythms of “mbele” might have found a home on triple-A radio in more enlightened times. On the other hand, cello-oriented cuts like “maché (for nathou)” and “interludes one and two” convey an emotional punch that likely couldn’t have been put into words – not to mention showing off their expressive playing, which is clearly classically trained but not bound. The heart of the record, though, beats to the voice of YATTA, a poet who contributes words to opener “let go, let god” to push back against the racism that so often drives social and political decisions in this country – even this world. Midway through the album, “in the waters between life and death” brings it all together – the cello magic, the R&B elements, the overall gestalt – into one epic, potent song that displays Brown’s vision in one succinct timespan. Brown establishes their identity on this record, in all its many facets.
Speaking of eclectic… Multi-instrumentalist Darian Donovan Thomas immediately attracted attention with his striking looks, with glam makeup and a babydoll dress draped over the body of a bearded black man. But anyone who heard or saw him perform with iconoclasts like Arooj Aftab (a New Amsterdam alum), Wild Up (a current NA artist), or Yasmin Williams knew there was more to what he did than just defy visual expectations. A sequel to his NA debut A Room With Many Doors: Night, A Room With Many Doors: Day (duh) swims in many different pools, from acid soul pop (“Ugly Betty”) and jumping bean electropop (“HereThere”) to dreamy atmopop (“Mr & Mr Married”) and crunchy alt.rock (“OhNo”). Though the album can seem all over the place, in truth it’s all of a piece. Thomas gives each song what it musically needs, worrying not about sonic continuity but an emotional thread – the yearning for love, acceptance, even life, only to have these things turn against you. It helps that Thomas’ light tenor – welcoming, non-threatening, vulnerable – remains at the center of every arrangement, lending a sonic hook for those that need it.
