Nov
14
with Clarice Jensen & Kevin Hufnagel
Sun November 14th, 2021
7:30PM
Main Space
Minimum Age: All Ages
Doors Open: 6:30PM
Show Time: 7:30PM
Event Ticket: $15
Day of Show: $18
Marissa Nadler
Marissa Nadler has been performing since 2000, releasing a number of well-received studio albums, and most recently, July on Bella Union in early 2014. She taught herself to play guitar as a teenager, and at the age of 15 began to write her first songs. Her musical style has been described as “dream folk”, featuring her haunting mezzo-soprano over the steady foundation of her acoustic guitar. Lyrically, her music has a strong narrative aspect, featuring introspective and American Gothic themes complimented by reverb-laden instrumentation and production.
The Boston Globe wrote “She has a voice that, in mythological times, could have lured men to their deaths at sea, an intoxicating soprano drenched in gauzy reverb that hits bell-clear heights, lingers, and tapers off like rings of smoke”.
July, her first release on Sacred Bones (US) and Bella Union (EU) Records, was recorded at Seattle’s Avast Studio, pairing Nadler with producer Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O))), Wolves in the Throne Room). Dunn matches Nadler’s darkness by creating a multi-colored sonic palette that infuses new dimensions into her songs. July is the kind of release that reminds you why NPR counts Nadler’s songwriting as so “revered among an assortment of tastemakers”, and an album she couldn’t have made earlier in her career because, as every songwriter knows, she didn’t just write these songs: she lived them.
“The question of whether Marissa Nadler’s elegant folk music ought to soundtrack our dreams or haunt our nightmares has been a thread through her uncannily cohesive catalogue. With six albums in 10 years and never a misstep, Nadler has grown her own perceptive language . . . Nadler has few direct contemporaries—Bill Callahan, Sharon Van Etten, or Alela Diane come to mind—but here, on July’s most extreme song [“Dead City Emily”], she could sensibly share bills with, say, Iceage or Deafheaven.” Pitchfork 8.1
“On her sixth album, Boston-born singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler gets darker than ever before . . . Gone is the lithe, limber-voiced ingénue of last year’s ‘Wedding,’ and in her place lies Nadler’s blackest-ever-black album. New songs like ‘Was It a Dream’ and ‘Desire’ benefit from darker hired guns: Eyvind Kang’s strings, Steve Moore’s synths and the guitars of Phil Wandscher lend emotional heft and existential dread to these 11 phantasmagoric love songs.” NPR
“July unfolds as a near-perfect song cycle.” All Music
“Gorgeously ethereal” SPIN
Marissa Nadler official site
Marissa Nadler on Twitter
Marissa Nadler on Soundcloud
Clarice Jensen
Clarice Jensen is a composer and cellist based in New York who graduated with a BM and MM from the Juilliard School. As a solo artist, Clarice has developed a distinctive compositional approach, improvising and layering her cello through shifting loops and a chain of electronic effects to open out and explore a series of rich, drone-based sound fields. Pulsing, visceral and full of color, her work is deeply immersive, marked by a wonderful sense of restraint and an almost hallucinatory clarity. Meditative yet with a sculptural sharpness and rigor that sets it apart from the swathe of New Age / DIY droners, she has forged a very elegant and precise vision.
Her music has been described by Self-Titled as “heavily processed, incredibly powerful neo-classical pieces that seem to come straight from another astral plane”; by Boomkat as “languorously void-touching ideas, scaling and sustaining a sublime tension”; whilst Bandcamp remarked upon “a kaleidoscope of pulsing movement rich in acoustic beating and charged with other psychoacoustic effects, constantly shifting in density and viscous timbre.”
Jensen’s striking debut album For This From That Will Be Filled was released in April 2018 on the Berlin-based label Miasmah and followed in September 2019 with the “Drone Studies” EP, a cassette release via Geographic North. Signing to FatCat’s 130701 imprint (Max Richter, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hauschka, Dustin O’Halloran, etc.) in late summer 2019, her sophomore album The experience of repetition as death was released April 2020. Naming it among the top 50 albums of 2020, NPR remarked “This collection of requiems for a dying mother ranks among the great ambient albums of the 21st century.” Her latest album Esthesis was released in October 2022 and NPR ranked it among the Best Experimental Albums of the Year. Boomkat stated, “Jensen finds a fine line between in-the-moment, tactile precision and lingering hallucinatory afterimages that emerge from her improv/compositional system. The pieces betray an exquisite depth of feeling in Jensen’s diffractive rendering of shimmering layers and gently transitory movements,” with Magnetic Magazine reporting, “There is no doubt this album will impact people profoundly.”
Jensen recently scored three feature films – Amber Sealey’s No Man of God premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival; Takeshi Fukunaga’s Ainu Mosir, premiered at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival; Fernanda Valadez’s 2020 Sundance Film Festival award-winner Sin Señas Particulares (Identifying Features), for which Jensen was nominated for a 2021 Ariel Award for Best Original Music by the Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences. She is currently at work on several new film and television projects, as well as her next album.
A versatile collaborator, Jensen has recorded and performed with a host of stellar artists including Jóhann Jóhannsson, Max Richter, Björk, Stars of the Lid, Dustin O’Halloran, Nico Muhly, Taylor Swift, Michael Stipe, the National and many others. In her role as the artistic director of ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble), she has helped bring to life some of the most revered works of modern classical music, including pieces by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Gavin Bryars, and more. Jensen recently composed an evening-length work for ACME, The Exaltation of Inanna, for string quartet, guitar, and six singers. The piece is based on the writings of the first author known by name, Enheduanna (2300 BC), and was premiered at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York.
Kevin Hufnagel
Multifaceted guitarist/composer Kevin Hufnagel has been playing, writing, performing, and recording for over 30 years. In addition to his extensive discography of solo works, Kevin is guitarist for the bands Dysrhythmia, Gorguts, and Vaura. Past projects have included Sabbath Assembly and Byla. Guest appearances include work with vocalists Jarboe (Swans), Costanza Francavilla (Tricky), Genesis P-Orridge (Psychic TV), amongst others. In addition, Kevin has recently entered the world of composing for film, taking on a collaboration with director Natasha Kermani for the original score to her first full-length feature; the sci-fi/drama Imitation Girl.
Kevin’s solo career began in 1997 with his first release ‘While I Wait’. Subsequent recordings have seen Hufnagel shift fluidly from detailed classical/acoustic-based works (‘Songs for the Disappeared’, ‘Ashland’), hazy, texturally-immersive soundscapes (‘Transparencies’, ‘Polar Night’) to avant-garde/sound design glitch-guitar freakouts (‘Kleines Biest’, ‘Backwards Through the Maze’) to his latest full-length ‘Messages to the Past’, which features a return his earliest roots and influences as a guitarist.
Outside of touring and recording, Kevin also offers private guitar lessons in NYC, and online via video conferencing apps for those outside NYC.