The first ever portrait album of Ash Fure's music, performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra, Rebekah Heller, Brandon Lopez, and Nate Wooley.
Released as a limited edition hardcover book with a digital download code included, featuring documentation from Ash Fure's immersive performances, commentary by the composer, an interview with Nate Wooley (Sound American editor), and contributions from Zachary Woolfe (New York Times), Steve Smith (New Yorker), and others.
It feels false to refer to this release simply as the music of Ash Fure, because the world Fure creates is experientially so much more than what can be contained in a sound file, a text, a remembrance. Her work is tactile and sensuous—performances as haptic memory object—and encompasses ideas that transcend combinations of frequencies or a mapping of sound. Her compositions are as close to a microcosm of life as any I've ever experienced.
This document, however, is a good example of how Fure's work propagates. The recording and text is historical; the music contained within spans the earlier part of her, still early, career and it represents only a strain of her process. Fure's current work favors more multisensory experiential moments over the rigorous collection of chamber or orchestral acoustic and electronic sound contained here. The pieces on this release are articulated moments in her progress toward this new mode of thinking; they expand and explode our definition of chamber music. It is almost hard to believe that these sounds could be the carefully constructed, notated, and articulated product of a single creative spirit. And yet, here we are, engaging with a fresh voice in contemporary composition who will make us rethink what is possible.
The music here features the indefatigable virtuosity of Fure's long-time collaborators and close allies, the International Contemporary Ensemble. Warmly captured by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Studios, the music by the ensemble (as well as the iconoclastic voices of Rebekah Heller, Brandon Lopez, and Nate Wooley on A Library on Lightning and the live orchestra recording of Bound to the Bow) are presented as they should be: close, transparent sound that inhabits your psyche and transcends form, melody, and harmony.
CD + download coupon included.
Ash (Ashley) Fure's practice sits at the nexus of experimental music and experiential art. Described by the New Yorker as "staggeringly original" and "the most purely visceral music-theatre outing of the year," her full-bodied listening environments offer space for social reckoning through the political, poetic, and erotic multiplicities in sound.
A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Ash Fure also received a Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music Composition, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University.
Notable recent projects include Hive Rise: for Subs and Megas (2020), a migratory performance installation premiered at Berghain/CTM; Filament: for Trio, Orchestra, and Moving Voices (2018) commissioned by the New York Philharmonic; and The Force of Things (2017), an immersive installation opera that wrestles with the rising tide of eco-dread around us.
Ash Fure holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University and is an Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College.
