Label Profile: New Amsterdam Records
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Label Profile: New Amsterdam Records Ask the founders of New Amsterdam records what they are about, and they fumble and equivocate charmingly. It’s not normally a good sign when a label’s masterminds have a hard time articulating its mission, but most labels aren’t New Amsterdam: After all, how would you sum up the animating principle behind an output that includes William Britelle‘s dreamy, prog-rock besotted opus Television Landscape; Matt Marks‘s Christian-music-and-Bollywood pop fantasia The Little Death; Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society‘s steampunk/jazz hybrid Infernal Machines; and the haunting, indie-classical miniatures of eMusic Selects alums Victoire?
A few things can be said for certain: New Amsterdam is the product of three young, earnest, brainy composers – Judd Greenstein, Sarah Kirkland Snider and William Brittelle – who came out of music school and didn’t see the path they wanted to take ahead of them. So, armed with nothing but their native intelligence, open ears and enthusiasm, they decided to forge it. And it is with this overabundance of good will and ideas that the three of them have plowed forward, seeking to draw out, encourage and document all the most fascinating and durable music their colleagues and friends were making. In the process, the label has grown to represent what is fast becoming the core of the New York contemporary classical scene. New Amsterdam became a nonprofit organization in 2008; they share a large percentage of each record sold with the artists.
As such, they occupy a unique space in the indie-label sphere, one that is, it turns out, damnably difficult to put precisely into words. Perhaps Snider says it best: “What I want most out of New Amsterdam is to be a force that helps people achieve their artistic goals in the most satisfying way possible. It’s not that we have answers or means that others don’t, but if we love the music, we get behind it with a passion that I think comes from knowing firsthand how hard it is to make art and how important it is to feel like others get what you’re doing and are willing to throw their full weight behind it.”
eMusic’s Jayson Greene recently sat down with the three founders to get their thoughts on several of their projects, recent and upcoming, including some of their own.
Brittelle: I think [composer] Missy [Mazzoli]‘s work overall is remarkably distinct. She’s one of the few young composers whose music I can identify after only a few bars, regardless of instrumentation. She is incredibly focused and has a truly unique sound. I remember talking to her when she was thinking about starting Victoire. The idea of composers starting “bands” was still a new concept at that time – and by that I mean ensembles designed to play compositions by a specific composer in more typical rock venues. I think she is really courageous, it would’ve been easy for her to continue down the road of commissions, teaching, etc. and she’s chosen to not play it safe and follow her vision – even if that involves driving a “band van” cross-country on a DIY tour.
Snider: This album invades my consciousness in a very deep way and won’t leave; I have a rather obsessive mind and it honestly feels like the soundtrack to my thoughts at times, particularly at 3 a.m. when I wake up with it still in my head. There’s something beautiful and creepy about it at the same time, which is a musical combination I absolutely love. I like how Missy’s music inhabits a weird emotional space that’s dark and anxious but not definitively minor-key; there are so many odd notes and clashing chords. I also like that there isn’t a lot of traditional goal-directed motion, but rather this feeling of a pot forever on the boil – yet you’re left feeling like you’ve gone somewhere. That’s a really hard thing to do. I envy it.
Greenstein: In music school, as a composer, you’re taught to think primarily about “the notes” – harmony, counterpoint, form – with “sound” as something that comes in afterward. In the wide world of music beyond academia, though, sound is everything; it’s the way that listeners determine genre, draw connections between artists, and make decisions about their likes and dislikes. Victoire feels to me like Missy’s response to those two ways of approaching music, one of which we both learned in school, and the other of which we all learned everywhere else. How can we, as composers, take our craft into that world? Victoire, as much as any other artist on our label, has a distinct sound, one that provides a perfect palette for Missy to work with, and which moves her music into a conversation with other music outside of the classical realm – but on her own terms, and in her own way. It’s a beautiful record that maintains a perpetual state of wonder, of familiar objects being viewed through new lenses, of the distinction between past and present coming in and out of focus.
Sarah Kirkland Snider/Shara Worden/Signal, Penelope
Brittelle: To me, this is the most quintessentially NewAm album. Sarah’s influences are so thoroughly digested that you’re left with something truly unique and new. More importantly, however, is the fact that the emotional power and consistency of this record is simply remarkable. Like my favorite pop records, it brings you into an emotional world and keeps you there for the duration (a la Disintegration or OK Computer). At the same time there are surprises at every turn – the music is inventive and, at times, rather challenging – but all the musical twists and turns are designed specifically to heighten emotion. I hear something new in the arrangements each time I listen to this record.
Snider: I was going to recuse myself from Penelope discussion, but I do have to blab for two seconds about the fact that this album wouldn’t exist were it not for Bill and Judd. They encouraged me so thoroughly from day one to make this music all that I wanted it to be, not to hold back in any way, and they played a huge role in its development, acting as creative and logistic sounding boards at every step. To me this album is a reminder that something that seems out of reach can happen if supported in the right way, by the right people. What I want most out of New Amsterdam is to make that happen for as many deserving members of our community as possible; to be a force that helps people achieve their artistic goals in the most satisfying way possible. It’s not that we have answers or means that others don’t, but if we love the music, we get behind it with a passion that I think comes from knowing firsthand how hard it is to make art and how important it is to feel like others get what you’re doing and are willing to throw their full weight behind it.
Greenstein: Penelope, in addition to being one of my absolute favorite records, is also a great example of what can happen to a project when its creator (in this case, Sarah) treats the recorded medium as a complete end unto itself, with no holds barred. There is no sense in which this album is a “reflection” of a live performance, and yet, it’s not a collection of songs that were written with the album in mind. Instead, it’s a live piece that was transformed into a brilliant record that feels absolutely unimaginable in any other format – until you see the live show. Sarah has been absolutely fastidious at each transformative juncture, spending more time on re-orchestrations than many composers would spend on writing the score itself. The result is a shining example for the rest of us to follow when we bring our work into the studio, and back out again. It’s also a fantastic collaboration between three artists, and particularly, between Sarah and Shara [Worden, of My Brightest Diamond], whose musically gifts perfectly complement the others’. Shara makes these songs truly her own; she treats them with such care that they sound as though she wrote them herself.
William Brittelle, Television Landscape
Brittelle: Take it away guys. Dazzle me.
Snider: Like Penelope, I think of Television Landscape as another child of New Amsterdam – by that I mean, it was the product of endless conversations between the three of us at the heart of which was: “But what do you really want to do?” We are all immensely grateful for our grad school experiences and compositional training, but I think one of the things we were reacting against when we formed New Amsterdam was this idea of what was expected of us as “new music” composers who’d recently graduated – what we “should” write to please our teachers and critics, to win competitions and grants, to take another proper step on the career ladder of this strange little niche-y world. Bill has big, passionate love for a lot of different music, including stuff that was clearly verboten by the guardians of blue-blood good taste, and he wanted to make some music that didn’t have a complicated relationship with it. So he did. And the result was TVL, which is this giant, sprawling, open-hearted love letter to music. It’s rich, gutsy, nerdy, and gorgeous. I think for me the moment that sums up the whole album is when the children’s chorus comes in during “Sheena” – I get near choked up every time. This boy from small-town North Carolina who was a Def Leppard-loving piano competition-winning jazz prodigy turned punk-rocker turned classical composer finally figured it all out.
Greenstein: It’s hard for me to talk about Television Landscape without recalling my own experience of the record’s creation – Bill and [his wife] Molly moving to California, Bill working on it from his house in a foreign place, our ruminations on New York versus California, his discovery of the Salton Sea, and so on. TVL is a “record” not just in the musical sense, but also in the sense of it recording a very specific time and place, and a physical and emotional space. The record carries a sense of being alone in a place that is both foreign and also somehow actually your own; interestingly, it’s an idea not too dissimilar to the concept of Future Shock (from the book of that name), which is the name of Bill’s latest project. It’s a record of a displaced person, taking in the oddities of Los Angeles and its surrounding areas, and drawing conclusions from them about the way we live, but also drawing musical conclusions that force the record out of any convention.
For example. Bill talks a lot about the “prog rock” sensibility in Television Landscape, but the album actually doesn’t sound anything like the ’70s rock that gave birth to that term. Where there are references to that era, they are much more in the “soft rock” vein, such as in the harmonized French horns or the piano-driven balladry. Those, combined with the frequent vocal layering and auto-tune, as well as the bright synths and omnipresent guitar solos, carry TVL into a space of maximum earnestness and slickness, all at once, more slick than original prog-rock but more earnest than its AM radio ’70s counterpart. It’s almost as if Bill is saying, “If we’re going to do this, let’s really do this.” And, underneath all that, there’s a thorough control of form, as well as a rich tapestry of orchestrations and small-level musical decisions; these are the real backbone of the album. Yes, you can unleash Mark Dancigers to deliver a three-minute guitar solo, but it’s a completely different decision if you’ve set it up with a series of ever-changing textures and colors. It’s easy to see how this is similar to, say, a band like Yes, but it’s also similar to a composer like Beethoven, whose grandest gestures were set up with the subtlest, and who rarely offered one kind without the other. That’s the level at which Television Landscape operates.
Matt Marks, The Little Death. Vol. 1
Brittelle: The first time I listened to this record in full I was driving through the California desert with my wife, and we were both like, “Holy shit, what the hell is going on?!?” (in a good way). The album is so tuneful and so catchy, even though it’s at times rather demented. Matt is someone with a typical NewAm background – he went to a top music school, plays in a top new music ensemble – but his inspiration has taken him in a unique, almost visionary direction. I’m blown away by the production value on this record, especially since it was self produced. Aside from professional mastering, it’s basically a “bedroom record.”
Snider: I first heard about this music from Mellissa Hughes back in 2007; we were working together on a piece and she mentioned how she’d just started dating this guy and they were working obsessively on this pet project of his that blended Christian pop music and Bollywood samples with weird beats and other zaniness and was just generally off the wall. I checked out his MySpace page which had this Debbie Gibson cover he and Melly did, and I absolutely loved it – it was crazy and twisted and imaginative and somehow imbued it with this weird, deep sadness. So I was very curious to hear Little Death. And I loved it for all the same reasons. My husband and I put this record on and dance around our living room. Like with TVL, you can almost hear the gears in his brain reconciling all these disparate ideas and influences, and the result is pure joy and exuberance.
Brittelle: I think Ted is a compositional and organizational force to be reckoned with. Katrina Ballads is probably our most intricate and challenging record, though, like Penelope, it’s highly charged with emotion. Seeing Ted perform “Brownie, You’re Doing a Heck of a Job” was one of the highlights of my year.
Snider: I want Katrina Ballads to tour the country, like, immediately. This was one of the best live shows I’ve seen in recent years – the performances were stop-your-heart amazing and I haven’t heard an audience that roused by “new music” in a while. Katrina Ballads is an incredibly accomplished work and probably pulls together more distantly-situated musical idioms than any other we’ve released (jazz, rock and R&B blend seamlessly with strains of modernism as well as minimalism.) But while there’s tremendous craft and heady thinking, there’s also tremendous soul – the idiosyncracies of the vocal jams like “Brownie” and “Kanye West” make Justin Timberlake look dull.
Brittelle: The album that started it all. The first NOW show I saw was basically my introduction to our community. I could feel that something exciting was going on, a new spirit of compositional openness, a real electricity. The album itself is pristine and moving. I love the A/B form of “Cloudbank”, the textured pointillistic opening and the melodic and emotive closing. “Folk Music” is the closest thing we have to a NewAm greatest hit.
Snider: To echo Bill, I think of NOW as the seed from which everything NewAm sprung. Not just because the need to release their album was the reason the label was created, but in a larger sense: Judd and I were at Yale together when he formed NOW, and at that time creating a group to perform music by only young, emerging composers seemed a radical idea (most fledgling new-music enterprises I was familiar with felt the need to prove themselves with at least some higher-profile associations.) But NOW was not only about young composers, it was about music that was open to all kinds of influences and emotional statements. Even with other so-called “hip” and “pop-influenced” ensembles I hadn’t heard music that explored the particular strains of sincerity and storytelling that NOW did. I was drawn to that and felt that it was music that a lot of people – regardless of background – could likely relate to and find meaning in. Of course NewAm has since grown into something quite broad and irreducible to any particular sound or style, but I think both the DIY spirit and aesthetic openness that I first saw in NOW are two of the most important values that inform what we do on a daily basis.
Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Infernal Machines
Brittelle: Judd, Sarah and I went to hear Darcy play at [New York City venue (Le) Poisson Rouge] and were totally blown away – Sarah and I were trying to play it cool after the show but ended up gushing and basically asking Darcy if we could put out his record. This is literally one of my favorite jazz albums of all time. I think it’s unique in the sense that the record doesn’t try to simply capture the spirit of live performance – the production value is really high, and it ends up sounding more like a rock record. The guitars and drums really kick, the bass is really present. A great road trip record.
Snider: Ha, yeah I definitely failed at playing it cool. Darcy’s music blew me away. And I’m actually not a huge jazz person, which is how I knew I loved it. What struck me most about his music was that it seemed to be about mood rather than style. He paints moods so precisely, using whatever tools he has at his disposal – and he wields those tools so outrageously well that whatever they are, whatever world they’re from, becomes irrelevant. His music is epic and grand and so brilliantly crafted. I love that he doesn’t pose any questions without answering them. He sets you up for big expectations, and then he totally delivers. That is so rare.
Corey Dargel, Someone Will Take Care of Me
Brittelle: Corey’s previous record, Other People’s Love Songs, was a kind of indie classical electro masterpiece. With SWTCM, Corey moved back to working with acoustic instruments, the result is just as catchy, and draws a connection to the chamber music and art song traditions. Corey’s voice is gorgeous. It provides a unique and appropriate vessel for delivering Corey’s twisted tales of love and sickness.
Snider: Every time I listen to Corey’s music I find myself saying, “How the hell does he think of this shit?” It sounds like pop music, but wait, it’s totally not, what are these weird asymmetrical phrases and beat patterns and how does he make them palatable and memorable so you don’t realize you’re singing along to incredibly complicated music? It’s sophisticated, brainy art music in earworm’s clothing. Every time I listen I hear something new in the craft and orchestration that makes me marvel. But I really like that he doesn’t let his smarts get the best of him. There is snark, yes, but there is also heart-rending sincerity, both lyrically and musically, and it’ll appear on a dime, where a sudden chord change will reveal the excruciating sadness in what you first think is just a really funny line. I love so many songs on this double album, but one that always takes me by surprise is “Everybody Says I’m Beautiful” – the empathy and sweetness really get me.
