For four years, new music ensemble thingNY has fused fluxus-esque experimentation with theatrically-charged chamber music. For its first album, this “creative new music cabal” [Time Out New York] has chosen to release a comic book + CD package of their experimental opera, ADDDDDDDDD.
With influences from Robert Ashley, Berg, Boulez, Braxton and Bjork, thingNY’s collaboratively-composed ADDDDDDDDD is an opera exploring the sweet sounds of excess. In a poetically verbose blend of noise, song, and spoken word, the five composer/performers highlight the everyday excesses of our lives as told through chants, rants, and advertising jingles.
The album (co-produced by thingNY and Brendan James) opens with the both earnest and absurd prologue, “Stories by Interesting People” but quickly becomes a montage of numbers, appointments, peeves, dreams and commercial interruptions in five-part harmony. The accompanying comic book libretto features artwork from various artists and musicians, including some of the band.
PRAISE FOR THINGNY
“As avant-garde as anything I’ve seen recently” -Kyle Gann
“…truly a thing of great beauty and wonder… thank god there are groups like thingNY (or maybe you’re the only one).” -Art Jarvinen
The New Yorker’s Alex Ross listed thingNY as part of the city’s burgeoning avant-garde classical music scene “striking an attitude of resistance to mainstream culture.” Comprised of composer-performers from the NYC metro area, thingNY revels in creating and performing unrelenting experimental new works with passion and enthusiasm, oscillating between the “sweeter sounds” and the “punishingly loud.” Since its first performance in October 2006, thingNY has produced four seasons of experimental music including a radio play by Beckett, a collaboratively-created opera and over a hundred premieres.
To purchase the album, visit:
www.thingNY.com
www.thingNY.com/opera
We are all ADDDDDDDDD!
