This week and next, I’m releasing records with Picard & Picard and thingNY, with record release shows in Philly at 2223 FISH and in NYC at the brand new David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center! Plus, this year at Rutgers, I’m a Graduate Fellow at the Eagleton Institute of Politics. Read on for more!
This Thursday at 7:30pm is Picard & Picard’s album release show in Philly on the longstanding Fire Museum Presents series at 2223 FISH! We’ll be sharing the bill with Cecila Lopez/Joe Moffett duo & Ben Bennett/Michael Foster/Jacob Wick trio. Carlos and I are playing first, so please come on time if you can. Facebook event here.
On Friday, our album, Hold Music for a Space Rescue, officially drops on Gold Bolus Recordings. The album is conceived as a set of music a futuristic space rescue company provides a crashed space explorer to listen to while awaiting rescue. We created the music from improvisations over Zoom recorded in late 2020, and Carlos’s sister, Marina Z. Cotallo, created a wonderful poster to accompany the release, designed to look like spacecraft safety instructions. I hope you’ll preorder the music and poster on our new Bandcamp page! Want a preview? David Weinstein will be playing a good chunk of the album tomorrow on his show on WFMU from 5-7pm.
Then next Friday, October 28, thingNY is finally releasing our recording of Rick Burkhardt’s ambitious Passover! The piece, which we premiered in 2018 and recorded in 2019, is loosely structured around a Passover seder and features a sextet of speaking instrumentalists relating stories of escape. The album is our first on Innova Recordings, and you can preorder it via Bandcamp, as a download or a CD with beautiful artwork by Jason Tseng.
On Saturday, October 29, thingNY will celebrate the album release with a free show in an upstairs space in the new David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center! We play at 8:30pm as part of an Open House Weekend celebrating the reopening of the NY Phil’s main hall after an extensive renovation. For the occasion, the group has cooked up a hot new program of loops and melodies.
We’ll continue to celebrate the album online with a watch party at 8:30pm on Friday, November 4th. Engineer extraordinaire Zach Herchen not only recorded the album’s audio but video of us recording it too. He’s assembled a cut that perfectly corresponds to the takes on the album. Watch it with us on YouTube here!
Finally, in addition to my planning school coursework, this year at Rutgers I’m honored to be a Graduate Fellow at the Eagleton Institute of Politics. This means that in the spring, I’ll be working 15 hours a week in the NJ State Senate Majority Office. Read more about me and my fellow Fellows here.
Meows from me, Evie, and Grba,
Jeff