Limelight: Cutting Edge Beautiful Dystopia

Brooklyn-based composer William Brittelle talks to Maddy Briggs from Limelight Magazine about his latest, genre-blind mini-album, Alive in the Electric Snow Dream, on New Amsterdam Records in which he stares down the apocalypse. Read more »

On first listen, William Brittelle’s mini-album Alive in the Electric Snow Dream is a shock to the system – a relentless flood of synths, strings and saxophone, with warped vocals complemented by an artificial choir, and reprieves of lush pads and soft melodic fragments.
On each subsequent listen, the most overwhelming aspect is the extreme care he has taken in treating all the material, even at its harshest and most distorted.
Speaking to Limelight, the Brooklyn-based Grammy Award-nominated composer says that the album began to form when he drove to Fort Tilden, an abandoned army installation at the end of Queens’ Rockaway Peninsula.
“I really fell in love with the place; it really resonated with me. I figured out how to join an artist community out there and gain access to a studio in one of the old barracks,” Brittelle tells me over Zoom. “It’s the closest you can get to a beautiful dystopia in New York City.”
Dilapidated, rusting and overgrown, with no running water in his studio and only a space heater to keep him warm, it was bastion and fuel for ruminations on different forms of apocalypse. During the winter he spent there, he was the first to stumble upon a shipwreck. As he began to imagine its backstory, a seed was planted.
“I started reflecting on how I was getting obsessive about these apocalyptic things and this sense of doom, but [how] I was also trying to avoid it; I didn’t want to stare at it head on. And so, I thought, ‘What if I just lean into those feelings? What if I stare into them directly without blinking and make music?’”
The album is wildly contrasting. Each of the title track’s seven movements runs for under two and a half minutes and there’s something new almost every few seconds. The second movement, Puking Rainbows, is a barrage of distorted synth and guitar. The beginning of the third, This Fortress, features gentle guitar chords diced by strings.
For Brittelle, the contrast conjures the extreme shifts that come with intense or overwhelming moments, which he describes as “almost psychedelic, out-of-body” experiences.
“The piece, Alive in the Electric Snow Dream, is 11 minutes long, and it took me, like, three years. Every second was a little sculpture. In the blueprint I had built for it, every single second is messed with in some way. It was a different, really extreme way for me to work, but I wanted to build something that had that hyper-attentiveness to every detail, where it’s more about listening to it over and over again.”
The album was tracked during the pandemic, so recording and production were completed in isolation. Brittelle, who would normally rerecord his digital synths with real ones in a studio, had to leave them as is. Leaning on musicians in whom he had a high level of trust, he enlisted collaborators including the Metropolis Ensemble, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, vocalists Jenn Wasner and Eliza Bagg, mixing engineer Zach Hanson and Paul Wiancko, cellist of the Kronos Quartet.
“[Wiancko] has built this crazy studio in his Red Hook apartment. He’s just an incredible player that gets what you’re trying to do and then adds an extra 20 or 30 percent onto it. The strings in this were really written just for Paul.”
Another link to the classical world comes in the album’s final track Dido’s Lament (Revisited). It repurposes the lyrics from Purcell’s aria for a 10-minute feminist retelling of Dido’s tale, set to synth, strings and chamber orchestra. For Brittelle, the work is more about the “narrative and connecting to the lore and mythology of [Dido]” than any regard of classical music.
With a grazing of 80s saxophone – born in 1977, Brittelle is “constantly in an 80s zone” – and retrofuturist synth stylings embedded throughout the album, I probe into Brittelle’s thoughts on genre. Is his aim to subvert it, or is he making more space within the boundaries of genre?
“I love this question, because I love the opportunity to say that I completely don’t care at all [about genre],” smiles Brittelle. “I don’t mean that in any kind of snarky way. My ultimate concern is the things that I feel really attracted to out in the world. [Alive in the Electric Snow Dream] took so long and so much attention. That doesn’t make it good, but it would be bizarre if I was [spending that much time] on trying to make a statement about what belongs in some genre or trying to move things externally, rather than exclusively in an [internal] mode of personal expression.”
“Rather than anything external, I think of it more as a palette of sounds and people I work with, getting at whatever musical itch I have at the time.”