Hello friends! Exciting news!
Today, I have the honor of sharing a new work with you all:
Retreat
a long-form musical meditation
co-composed and performed by myself and Zara Teicher
Available now as a cassette tape and digital download via Low Versions
I hope you’ll take some time to retreat with us.
Dive in below:
Retreat is the product of a long-standing creative conversation between myself and Zara Teicher. Whenever we make music together, we tend to find ourselves in the headspace of losing ourselves in something greater. So when we were given the opportunity to develop a piece in Detroit’s St. Anthony Cathedral — a historic landmark dating to 1902 with a gorgeous Möller pipe organ — we retreated fully into our normative state. Zara plays French Horn (she was conservatory trained) from the choir loft, and moves through the space to perform on harmonium and melodica as well. I played the organ, piano, and melodica. The result is an 80 minute through-composed performance that is lush, overwhelming, and full of heart. I’m so happy to share it with you.
The performance was produced through my currently-on-hiatus concert series Other Tones (poster below). We had the sense that we might only get one chance to do this performance, so we had filmmaker Christian Lathers capture it on film (still image above). We’ve been releasing clips on social media, and maybe we’ll put out the whole video soon. Chad Morgan-Sterenberg recorded, mixed, and mastered the audio. Later on, Isaac Helsen from Low Versions stepped in and offered to release it through his label.
Last weekend, we screened the whole film at Moondog Cafe for a listening party. It was such a joy to bring people together to listen to the music. Thanks to Moondog for hosting us, and thanks to everyone who came to share the space with us.
I wrote these words in November of 2023 as program notes to the performance of Retreat. They continue to resonate with me as a guiding light for what this piece represents:
Retreat asks the performers and audience to disappear into long expanses of sound, forgoing their sense of self to welcome spacious and dense vibrations. The 4 movements – “Resign”, “Realign”, “Reseed/Recede”, and “Repeat” – converge to offer a blueprint for giving up oneself to something larger – an ocean of sound, within which desire might fade away. It also asks us to consider the many meanings of a retreat – perhaps a withdrawing into oneself, perhaps a place of meditation, or perhaps the reversal of a military invasion.
So — thank you for reading, and thank you for listening. If you’re so inclined, come retreat with us into this ocean of sound. Give up, withdraw, reverse, resign — and we’ll dream up the impossible, together, on the other side of it all.
With love,
Michael