PRESS RELEASE: New Music, New Videos: Molly Joyce + Methods Body
Molly Joyce explores disability as a creative source with Breaking and Entering
Composer and performer Molly Joyce's Breaking and Entering is out now via NewAm's subscription-only Windmill Series. Available on all digital platforms June 5, the album features Joyce cultivating disability within the human body through a series of electro-acoustic works written and performed by Joyce on her instrument of choice — the electric vintage toy organ.
Breaking and Entering is a highly personal album through which Joyce explores disability as a creative source. She was involved in a car accident at the age of seven that impaired her left hand. As Joyce grew older and pursued her love of music, she searched for an instrument that wouldn’t limit her body or creativity — and found it in a vintage Magnus electric toy organ purchased on eBay. The toy organ’s unique design of chord buttons on the left and keyboard on the right is “made for her body, made for her form, made for her deform,” says Joyce. It engages her disability on a compositional and performative level, allowing her to change from thinking about what notes won’t sound or keys won’t press, but rather the notes that will sound, keys that will press, and experience possibilities from that fundamental difference.
Joyce uses these works to push against stigma and celebrate a singular body instead of hiding it away, creating a new social imaginary that values body complexity instead of conformity, and vitality rather than normality.
I Care If You Listen premiered the video for "Form and Flee." Watch below, and listen + support at Bandcamp.
Modern Drummer premieres first single from Methods Body
Today, Modern Drummer premieres the video for Methods Body's first single, "Quiet Pt. 1 - They Didn't Come Here." Watch the cathartic joy of two best friends playing the hell out of their instruments.
Listen + follow on Spotify for updates on new Methods Body releases.
“Dark twin, meet your light twin.” That’s how John Niekrasz and Luke Wyland were first introduced to each other in 2007. It’s an apt description of the duality and synergy of their musical project Methods Body. Using keys/electronics and percussion, the two maximize the duo configuration to create music at once primal and futuristic. Overflowing with polyrhythms and layers of microtonal melodies, the two suites on Methods Body’s self-titled debut conjures a sense of traveling through space and time to a prismatic, post-human landscape.
The record is meant to evoke the processes of thought, the sounds of neurons firing, synaptic receptivity, and a fractalization of motifs that transport the listener to an inward landscape. Wyland employs his own unquantized sound-capturing technology to sculpt compositions from Niekrasz’s improvisations in real time. Refracted rhythms and cascading non-standard tunings carve out new emotional spaces.
Pre-order at Bandcamp today! Methods Body is out May 22 as a co-release with Portland-based Beacon Sound.