Brooklyn Rider performs borderlands… by Matana Roberts
Virtual performance and conversation live on Youtube and Facebook
July 15th, 5pm EDT
Join us for an online performance and conversation with Brooklyn Rider and composer Matana Roberts.
The album’s darker moods are present from the very beginning. The first track, borderlands… by Matana Roberts, references the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. “I decided to focus on a type healing that is about healing cultural rifts,” she explains. Murmuring voices open the track, intoning definitions and descriptions of the piece’s title. What begins as an undulating smear of disjunct tones is sculpted by the quartet into a massive wall of sound. Bouncing back and forth between foreboding and quiet confusion, the track fades into a mélange of ensemble grumbling of both voice and bow. – I care if you listen
Brooklyn Rider (photo courtesy of Shervin Lainez)
Hailed as “the future of chamber music” (Strings), Brooklyn Rider offers eclectic repertoire in performances that attract fans and draw critical acclaim from classical, world, and rock writers. A deeply collaborative and generative ensemble, Brooklyn Rider recently released The Butterfly with Irish fiddler Martin Hayes and Dreamers with Mexican jazz vocalist Magos Herrera. This past season, Brooklyn Rider debuted their Healing Modes project, which presents Beethoven’s Opus 132 string quartet alongside five new commissions by Reena Esmail, Gabriela Lena Frank, Matana Roberts, Caroline Shaw, and Du Yun.
Other recent recording projects include The Fiction Issue with music by Gabriel Kahane, so many things with Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, A Walking Fire and The Brooklyn Rider Almanac, The Impostor with banjo legend Béla Fleck, Silent City with Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor, and the much-praised Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass. The ensemble’s violinist Johnny Gandelsman launched In A Circle Records in 2008 with the release of Brooklyn Rider’s debut recording Passport, followed by Dominant Curve in 2010, Seven Steps in 2012, and Spontaneous Symbols in 2017.
Matana Roberts is an internationally renowned composer, sound experimentalist and mixed-media practitioner. Roberts works in many contexts and mediums, including improvisation, dance, poetry, and theater. She has released a diverse body of solo and ensemble work under her own name on Constellation and Central Control records over the past decade. She is perhaps best known for her acclaimed Coin Coin project, a multi-chapter work of “panoramic sound quilting” that aims to expose the mystical roots and channel the intuitive spirit-raising traditions of American creative expression while maintaining a deep and substantive engagement with narrativity, history, community and political expression within improvisatory musical structures. Roberts is currently a guest of the Berliner Kunstler Programm des DAAD.
Matana Roberts (photo courtesy M. Tarantelli)
