LATEST NEWS :

Daníel Bjarnason & Sam Amidon in NYC

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:04:03 +0000

Daníel Bjarnason will be performing at a Processions album-launch in NYC on March 3rd. He has assembled a 17 piece chamber orchestra especially for the occasion, featuring cellist Sæunn Þorsteinsdóttir, one of the soloists from Processions.

Opening the night will be no other than our very own Sam Amidon, who will be performing some material from his upcoming album I See The Sign.

The concert will take place at (Le) Poisson Rouge
158 Bleecker St (at Thompson St)  Greenwich Village | Map
Wednesday March 3rd at 7:30pm
Read more:

Happy Monday.

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:45:39 +0000

The official release of Valgeir Sigurðsson’s Draumalandið is today!

This is an original-soundtrack album from the film Dreamland, with music written for a 20 piece chamber ensemble and electronics. The recording features Nico Muhly (arrangements, piano, celesta, harmonium), Sam Amidon (vocals, banjo, guitar) Ben Frost (electronics), Hildur Guðnadóttir (cello), Borgar Magnason (double bass), Nadia Sirota (viola) and Daníel Bjarnason (piano-preparation).

Get your copy HERE. (also on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Press quotes for Draumalandið:

"From the dynamic production to the warm tones of the orchestration, Draumalandið rewards the careful listener with the subtlety of its construction".
—The Silent Ballet

“...rendering Iceland as the land of [Bernard] Hermann-scored environmental nightmare.”
—Mapsadaisical

“Highly recommended”
—Boomkat

Nominations..

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:48:49 +0000

Just a quick note on some exciting awards nominations that have come in for Bedroom Community artists this week:

—Valgeir Sigurðsson is nominated for Best Soundtrack at the Icelandic Film Academy Awards (EDDA) for the music for Dreamland (Draumalandið).

—Ben Frost is nominated for Best Album, (classical / contemporary) at the Icelandic Music Awards for BY THE THROAT.

—Daníel Bjarnason is nominated for the Nordic Music Prize for ‘Bow To String’ from Processions.
Daníel and Processions got these nominations for the Icelandic Music Awards:
- Best Composer: Daníel Bjarnason
- Best Album (classical / contemporary): Daníel Bjarnason

Furthermore, the performers on Processions Sæunn Þorsteinsdóttir, Víkingur Ólafsson and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra all got nominated at the Icelandic Music Awards.

Congratulations everyone!

“Two Boys”

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 01:44:56 +0000

Read Nico Muhly’s own words on the opera he is creating for The Metropolitan Opera / English National Opera (ENO) with libretto by Craig Lucas:

The chatroom is the masked ball of the 21st century. There, the princess can be the peasant bar-wench, and the 60-year old man can be the 15 year-old girl he should have been 45 years ago.

The opera I've written with Craig is a love story, a murder ballad, and a proper mystery.

Invisible crimes (Internet crimes, White-collar crime) are the new murders. Even though Bernie Madoff's crimes were digitally manipulated, he still had to wear a bulletproof vest to court: the intersection between the virtual and the real is always ecstatic or violent.

My adult life is grafted to the development of the internet. When I was 14, in 1995, we got the internet in our house. From that time, I've maintained friendships that have been exclusively online. I think this is explicitly true for people of my generation, but also secretly true for older generations.

A love-story based on texts whose authors nobody can see is the most exciting love story I can think of. It's an epistolary novel where everybody is lying about who they are.

An opera that takes place primarily online suggests immediately a synthesized orchestra; I resisted this. The orchestration for this project is entirely acoustic. In Britten's A Death in Venice, the world of forbidden sexuality is marked with a highly stylized gamelan music; I have stolen this idea and my opera is permeated with heavily manipulated Balinese ostinati which symbolize the look-but-don't-touch online universe of lies and seduction. I worship at the altar of operas with synthesizers; I think Nixon in China is a high water-mark of Western Civilization and if people say anything bad about Satyagraha they have to fight me. Adams, Glass, and Reich created a world where the synthesized is incorporated into the acoustic; I was interested, in this piece, in forcing myself to conceive of the soundworld entirely acoustically.

One of the things that so immediately attracted me to this case is the fact that the younger boy "composed" a very complicated piece of drama: many different personæ who, through content, grammar, diction, and orthography, manipulate their audience into submission. The eventual fate of this composer is a knife to the heart in the parking lot of a shopping center — is there a story more tragic?

I am as infatuated with online personalities as I am with people I have met in the flesh. I am as angry with online personalities as I am with people I have met in the flesh.

Craig Lucas's libretto is wonderfully settable. I got the first draft as a PDF and within twenty minutes of reading it, I knew how the opera needed to sound.

I made a decision early on in this process to have invented internet characters have as much personality (if not more) than real people. How many of us have relationships with people online that are more nuanced, complicated, and emotionally involved than the people we see everyday?

It's all about an opera that is relevant to the social structures that govern us. I spoke to four people on the phone today, but sent 150 emails from my computer, 62 from my phone, and an uncountable number of texts.

My first experiences using the internet were ones that very explicitly and deliberately resisted (and of course, articulated) my upbringing: I searched for anything that would horrify my parents who are bohemian-bourgeois artists and academics. The characters in this opera are engaged in similar pursuits: they are crossing class, race, and geographical lines to invent a life for themselves in a virtual space.

Online I am invincible; online I am with my friends in New York as opposed to in an efficiency apartment in East London, online I am with my grandmother in Heaven eating her roast capon, online I have access to all the music I want to listen to, online nobody notices what I am wearing, online I can simultaneously research King George VI and a proper recipe for a za'atar mixture. Online I am chatting with a high church vicar as well as an homosexual shopkeep in New Haven; online I can research an Icelandic noun before I try to decline it haphazardly.

Whale Watching Tour, new dates

Mon, 8 Feb 2010 03:22:05 +0000

The Whale Watching Tour, a Bedroom Community collective concert series featuring Valgeir Sigurðsson, Nico Muhly, Ben Frost & Sam Amidon, + ensemble, will return in the spring. Here are the first confirmed dates, and more to come soon:

WHALE WATCHING TOUR : SPRING 2010

19 Apr Vooriut —Gent, BELGIUM
20 Apr The Barbican — London, UK
21 Apr National Concert Hall — Dublin, IRELAND
24 Apr Arnolfini — Bristol, UK
25 Apr Reading Concert Hall — Reading, UK
4 May Sala — Torino, ITALY
6 May Minoritenkirche, Donau Festival — Krems, AUSTRIA
8 May Konzert & Kongress — Uppsala, SWEDEN
16 May National Theatre (Þjóðleikhúsið) — Reykjavík, ICELAND

New Artist—New Release

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:15:02 +0000

We are now shipping Daníel Bjarnason’s debut album Processions. You can order a CD digipak or buy the record digitally.. An instantly downloadable code comes bundled with every CD purchase and the download includes Bonus Materials Extravaganza*

“Bedroom Community (whose last release was Ben Frost’s By the Throat), has shown remarkable prescience in choosing this album as its first release of 2010. The year may be in its infancy, but to this reviewer, Processions is already the one to beat.”
—The Silent Ballet (read more)

“Daníel Bjarnason’s music is so intelligently crafted, it makes you want to pause the concert every second and look at a score. At the same time, the craft whizzes by organically, and you don’t have enough time to pause and contemplate. [...] His album is just a small peek into the life of his mind”.
—Nico Muhly

Click here to order Processions and start enjoying the music posthaste.

*2 Bonus Tracks : “all sounds to silence come” with Processions orders. This piece is performed by the Ísafold Chamber Orchestra and produced by Michael Silberhorn. The two movements of “all sounds...” come as a part of the [bundled & standalone] album download.

Daníel’s official webiste is here.

Nico Muhly and Sam Amidon in London

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:08:53 +0000

For those lucky enough to be in London, don't miss the opportunities to see Nico Muhly and Sam Amidon live this weekend and more:

-This Saturday (23/1) Sam Amidon will perform at the Shhh Festival at Cecil Sharp House with surprise guests and good friends.

-The following Sunday (24/1) Nico Muhly will be heading a performance at the Roundhouse with Britten Sinfonia. Nico will direct and perform Britten Sinfonia in a programme exploring his own compositions alongside works by his musical mentors Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and new songs and arrangements with Sam Amidon. Get tickets HERE.

Furthermore on February 8th, Nico’s residency with the Britten Sinfonia—read more about that big adventure here—will have him performing and conducting at South Bank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, with the Britten Sinfonia, tenor Mark Padmore and violinist Pekka Kuusisto who will be premiering brand new works by Nico Muhly. For the program they have paired his new music with extraordinary works by Reich and Adams that’s been a huge influence on Nico. Tickets and info here.

Look Back/2009—Look Ahead/2010

Wed, 6 Jan 2010 15:36:26 +0000

The year 2009 was a remarkable year for Bedroom Community, and in many ways marks the way for what’s coming up in 2010.

2009 HIGHLIGHTS

BY THE THROAT
—Our only official release this year was Ben Frost’s BY THE THROAT. This record had been eagerly awaited by many, the wait was rewarded in September and we are now getting ready for a vinyl edition.
Here are just a few of the year-end lists that hail BY THE THROAT:
—The Wire #9
—Resident Advisor #16
—Milk Factory #2
—Silent Ballet #2
—Pitchfork #10
—Boomkat #28
—Other Music (no ratings system)
—Brainwashed #19
—Abstract Dynamics #15

NEW SIGNING
—Daníel Bjarnason is an extraordinary Icelandic composer that we are thrilled to have on our label, collaborate with and be able to feed to your hungry ears. His debut album Processions was created with Valgeir Sigurðsson and is out soon! Welcome Daníel!

WHALE WATCHING TOUR
—The four artists that until recently have formed the intimate Bedroom Community collective decided to bring their collaborative energy to the live stage. They ‘sailed’ across Europe under the banner of the Whale Watching Tour, playing a string of celebrated shows. See below for more.

2010 IS NOW

—We released one single (and singular) album in 2009, but everyone was working hard on new music and now the fruits of the labour will soon be released, one after the other. Here is what is coming up for the early part of 2010:

Daníel Bjarnason’s Processions will be our first 2010 release. In the words of his producer and label head: Daníel Bjarnason is ‘the other classical composer’ on our label, a throne he now shares with Nico Muhly. Daníel and Nico may both conjure their magic and craft via black dots on manuscript paper but their music is fundamentally different. If anything else connects it—apart from allowing me to cast my own spell on it—it is that it is all brand-new; taking nothing as given while being fully informed of the past and the possibilities of now.

Valgeir Sigurðsson’s Draumalandið will be released at the end of February. The album, a soundtrack to the Dreamland film, swells from moments of expansive beauty into massive, surging symphonic force. Its harmonies are anxious, pulsing, driven.Tender, fragmented melodies rise out of uncanny musical textures. Valgeir’s score makes fierce and direct statements of sorrow and indignation, but it also expresses, with a kind of hushed awe, the beauty of landscapes on the brink of devastation, and the seductive shimmer of the illusions that imperil them.

Sam Amidon’s I See The Sign will follow hot on the heels of Dreamland on the very first day of March! The needle-drop fuzz that cues I See The Sign raises the curtain on a world of little theatres, foretelling of an aural gut-grip that is fully human and wholly natural. Amidon’s intuitive and often radical reworking of age-old secular ballads, gospel, folk songs, and hymns render familiar characters new through his direction, vision, vocals, banjo, guitar, and stellar contributions from fellow musicians.

Other highlights will include the WHALE WATCHING TOUR Spring Redux. Sam Amidon, Ben Frost, Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurðsson along with Helgi Jónsson, Borgar Magnason, Nadia Sirota and Una Sveinbjarnardóttir will return with this unique concert series. Look at this video to get an idea of what this is, it says more than many words.

And all this only brings us up to the month of May 2010. There is still more to come!

Yay to 2010, have a good one!

WWT VIDEO::