PRESS RELEASE
January 24, 2024
William Brittelle New Album Release February 23 on New Amsterdam Records
New Amsterdam releases composer William Brittelle’s new studio album, Alive in the Electric Snow Dream, on February 23, 2024 featuring Holland Andrews, Jenn Wasner, Eliza Bagg, and Metropolis Ensemble conducted by Andrew Cyr.
Behind the scenes in Fort Tilden, NY where William Brittelle composed “Snow Dream” in 2020.
Album cover for “Alive in the Electric Snow Dream”
New York, NY— William Brittelle, the Grammy-nominated Brooklyn-based composer and producer known as “a mercurial artist whose oeuvre embraces post-punk flamboyance, chamber music elegance, and much more” (The New Yorker) announces his upcoming “mini-album,” Alive in the Electric Snow Dream, releasing February, 23, 2024 via New Amsterdam Records.
A companion piece to his recently Grammy-nominated “Psychedelics” 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.
On January 24, 2024, Brittelle released the first single from the album: “Dido'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.
Developed and recorded during the pandemic with Metropolis Ensemble led by Grammy-nominated Andrew Cyr, 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.
All sales proceeds from “Snow Dream” will go directly to New Amsterdam, a Brooklyn-based non-profit artist service organization.
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In a flurry of activity in recent years, Metropolis Ensemble and William Brittelle have collaborated on many projects in recent years, including Forbidden Colors, The Meta Simulacrum, and the album release of Spiritual America. He is also working on an upcoming album with Wye Oak.
As a science fiction-obsessed child of the 1980's, William Brittelle has long found dystopian landscapes to be a source of fascination and mangled nostalgia. In 2017, on a whim, he visited Fort Tilden, an abandoned army base on the bleeding edge of Queens, and was immediately captivated. He shortly joined a local arts organization and was given access to a studio in one of the former barracks.
Though lacking heating and running water, the room gave Brittelle year-round access to the surrounding world of corroding munitions bunkers, vine covered hangars, and pristine beaches. On a frigid January seaside walk Brittelle happened upon a shipwreck, his prints in the sand and snow the only within sight, and began to imagine a backstory to the scene.
Over the following two years, Alive in the Electric Snow Dream emerged — a swirl of vintage synths, pop vocals, saxes, guitars, noise, screams, and strings outlining a dreamlike, first person apocalyptic vision. A mix of terror, wonder, adrenaline, and exhaustion, the piece, in eleven blistering minutes, explores a full range of psychedelic emotion.
About William Brittelle
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 Colón 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. More »
About Holland Andrews
Holland Andrews is a vocalist, composer, producer, and performer whose work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build cathartic and dissonant soundscapes. Andrews arranges music for voice, clarinet, and electronics and frequently highlights themes surrounding vulnerability and healing. Andrews harnesses these instruments’ innate qualities of power and elegance to serve as a cohesive vessel for these themes. As a vocalist, their influences stem from a dynamic range including contemporary opera, theater, and jazz, while also cultivating their own unique vocal style which integrates these influences with language disintegration, vocal distortion, and environmental ambience. Andrews previously performed solo music under the stage name Like a Villain. More »
About Metropolis Ensemble
Metropolis Ensemble is a Grammy-nominated nonprofit organization dedicated to commissioning and producing ambitious creative projects and expanding opportunities for emerging professional musical creators and performers to inspire audiences. They partner with world-class institutions to create, commission, and produce site-specific performances, new works, recordings, and digital experiences. More »
About Andrew Cyr
A champion of new work, Grammy-nominated conductor Andrew Cyr has led premiere performances at venues ranging from Cité de la Musique (Paris, FR), The Met Museum, Celebrate Brooklyn(!), New Victory Theatre, Hamer Hall (Melbourne, AU), Radio City Music Hall, BAM’s Next Wave Festival, and the Tonight Show. Cyr’s work as conductor has been described by Esa-Pekka Salonen as “precise, rhythmically incisive and fluid. He made complex new pieces sound natural and organic.” Described as a “prominent influence in the world of newly emerging music” (Washington Post), Cyr’s passion for creating new platforms for outstanding composers and performing artists led him to found Metropolis Ensemble in 2006. More »
About Zach Hanson
Zach Hanson is an audio engineer, producer, and musician from Wisconsin. In 2010, Zach joined the band of Bon Iver drummer Sean Carey as he ventured out on tour in support of his first solo release as S. Carey. Beginning in 2015, Zach spent two years playing drums on tour with The Tallest Man On Earth. Zach has also spent time in the studio with the likes of Low, Waxahatxhee, The Blind Boys Of Alabama, Whitney, and Bon Iver, which earned him two Grammy nominations for Best Alternative Music Album for his part in the band's 2016 album, 22, A Million, and Best Record for the follow up, 2019's i,i. More »
About New Amsterdam Records
New Amsterdam is a Brooklyn-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit artist’s service organization dedicated to supporting new music by composers and performers whose work transcends traditional and outdated genre distinctions. The label's artists have won numerous awards and accolades, including two Grammy Awards, seventeen Grammy nominations, and a Pulitzer Prize. New Amsterdam has also curated and presented more than 500 live concerts of groundbreaking new music. In recent years, the label embarked on a partnership with Nonesuch Records, seeing the release of approximately three albums per year to support contemporary American composers in realizing ambitious creative projects. More »
Press Contacts
Armistead Booker, Metropolis Ensemble
press@metropolisensemble.org
(757) 870-4591
New Amsterdam Records
press@newamrecords.com
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