ANNOUNCING: Dan Trueman's Songs That Are Hard To Sing
NOW AVAILABLE:
Dan Trueman's
Songs That Are Hard To Sing
ft. JACK Quartet and Sō Percussion
available for pre-order
Announcing the album release of Songs That Are Hard to Sing, an octet composed by Dan Trueman for the JACK Quartet and Sō Percussion. The record will be out everywhere November 15th. You can pre-order the digital record and CD here.
This collaboration of contemporary music heavyweights unites “the nation’s most important quartet,” (New York Times on JACK) with Sō Percussion’s “exhilarating blend of precision and anarchy, rigor and bedlam” (New Yorker). The project began when composer/fiddler/electronic musician Dan Trueman realized that many of his favorite tunes are, well, hard to sing.
“I’ve never worked with a group of string players so attuned to the richness of tuning,” Trueman says about the JACK Quartet, which becomes an extension of Trueman himself playing his beloved Norweigian Hardangar fiddle. “I am able to cast these ancient tunings out from my fiddle to the quartet, which also dovetails beautifully with the remarkable tuning capabilities of bitKlavier,” he says.
These dexterous sounds came together in a remarkable burst. The total time in-studio was less than 48 hours of playing as if live in a rehearsal room at Princeton University, where Trueman teaches and leads the Princeton Sound Kitchen and So Percussion serves as an ensemble in residence.
“The truly amazing thing about this recording is how ‘live’ the takes are,” explains Eric Cha-Beach of Sō Percussion. “The end result is something that you could listen to on the subway, but also put in a super hi-fi system and enjoy all of the details of the space,” says Cha-Beach.
Engineer Matt Poirier served as a mic wizard to capture this pristine ‘live’ take, which required little editing and no overdubbing.
Songs That Are Hard to Sing follows two previous New Amsterdam collaborations between Trueman and Sō Percussion: Nostalgic Syncronic, which debuted Trueman’s bitKlavier in recording, and Five (and-a-half) Gardens. In 2017 The Boston Globe picked Olagon, a cantata written by Trueman for the Chicago chamber ensemble Eighth Blackbird, as a top classical album of the year.