About Blue Alchemy for Ecstatic Music Fest:
The Ecstatic Music collaboration between these two innovative, multidisciplinary Brooklyn-based musical artists includes the world premiere of Blue Alchemy.
Blue Alchemy will explore the longform transmutation of sonic material. Pulling inspiration from the color blue and its historical contexts, Andrews and Thomas will shift the audience through spaces of extreme oceanic density to cloud-like openness. By shifting the texture of the space, they will also terraform emotion, investigating: what is the discomfort of being held? What is the relief of flight? Is weightlessness freedom – and is drowning defeat?
Andrews and Thomas are honored to be joined on stage by the Portland, Oregon based experimental percussion and electronics duo Methods Body as they collectively water this synesthesia-like realm of sound.
Holland Andrews is a vocalist, composer, and performance artist whose work is based on emotionality in its many forms. Andrews focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build soundscapes encompassing both catharsis and dissonance. Frequently highlighting themes surrounding vulnerability and healing, Andrews arranges music for voice, clarinet and electronics.
Brooklyn-based composer, multi-instrumentalist and interdisciplinary artist Darian Donovan Thomas is interested in combining genres and mediums into a singular vocabulary that can express ideas about intersectionality (of medium and identity). Necessarily, he is interested in redacting all barriers to entry that have existed at the gates of any genre – this vocabulary of multiplicity will be intersectional, and therefore all-inclusive.
Methods Body is a performance duo that creates original sound art and music using custom tunings systems, polyrhythms, and the cadences of language. Longtime collaborators Luke Wyland (keys, electronics) and John Niekrasz (drums, percussion) use bespoke live-sampling technologies to create compositions that inhabit waves of subliminal melody and deep, uncanny grooves. They're currently working on the follow-up to their critically acclaimed self-titled debut record (New Amsterdam Records/Beacon Sound 2020), forthcoming in 2022.