Waves & Lines Gemma Peacocke

GEMMA PEACOCKE

WAVES & LINES

From New Zealand-born, Princeton-based composer Gemma Peacocke, Waves & Lines is available exclusively through New Amsterdam’s Bandcamp subscription as part of the Windmill Series, a new digitally-focused set of releases for subscribers in addition to our existing release schedule.

The stylings of Gemma Peacocko have stood out to many, and has shaped their minds to see it as a “peculiar factor that has created a natural synthesis of different stylistic elements,” according to Yle Klassinen. The New Zealand Listener shared that “the poetic voices and Peascocke’s inventive musical storytelling have beauty, grit and a powerful emotional impact.”

Waves & Lines is a 50-minute multimedia song cycle for soprano, electronics and chamber ensemble. The album is based on a collection of Afghan women’s folk poems called landays. These poems are passed down secretly as a sung oral tradition and were collected and translated by Eliza Griswold in the book I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from contemporary Afghanistan.

Exploring the distance, anonymity and strange intimacy of phone calls, text messages, and radio broadcasts in which the poems are shared, the song cycle features the use of fixed electronics and projections.

Tracklisting:

Bees
Love
Father
Ice Cream
War
I Am The Beggar of the World
Separation
London

Composed by Gemma Peacocke
Adapted from I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan by Eliza Griswold

Eliza Bagg, Voice
Borah Han, Piano
Adam Holmes, Percussion
Pat Swoboda, Bass

Engineered, mixed and mastered by Mike Tierney