Favourite Label [3] - Bedroom Community

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Speaks Volumes marks the first release on Bedroom Community and features seven exquisite works of chamber music for small ensembles with electronics. This debut album by composer Nico Muhly was created with with Valgeir Sigurðsson in Reykjavik, Iceland and in New York, Nico’s hometown.

Since graduating from the Juilliard School for composition in 2004 Nico Muhly has been causing significant ripples in modern music circles with a variety of projects.

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On Theory Of Machines Frost presents a challenging and invasive sonic experience of digitally manipulated litany via minimal, guitar-oriented compositions that massage the lower-body and sometimes hurt above the waist ...A painfully beautiful experience.

The scale of Ben Frost’s Theory of Machines is enormous, exploiting every extreme of pitch, volume and timbre, recalling the unbounded enormity of the natural world. The changes in the music sometimes seem as gradual as changes in the weather—and sometimes as violent.

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Ekvílibríum is Valgeir Sigurðsson's debut album, but here he has revealed that as well as being a gifted producer, engineer and musician, he is equally skillful as a crafter of songs and instigator of a cascade of emotions.

Valgeir is joined by a number of guest musicians on Ekvílibríum, such as Samuli Kosminen on drums and Nico Muhly who plays piano. The album also features vocal performances from Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, who helps craft 2 of the songs, as well as Faun Fables' Dawn McCarthy and J. Walker aka Machine Translations.

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Sam Amidon heads to Iceland to record a follow up to his 2007 album But This Chicken Proved Falsehearted with arranger Nico Muhly and producer Valgeir Sigurðsson. The result of this collaboration is heard in All is Well.

“Last time I said that Amidon had made the most interesting folk album of 2007; suddenly he's one of our most powerful chroniclers of the myriad varieties and shades of grace. All Is Well is viscerally stunning, comforting, upsetting, entrancing...”
-Stylus Magazine

“Sam Amidon has worked several different wonders with All Is Well—giving these beautiful old songs new life, drastically transforming the music of Samamidon without losing any of the power of their debut, providing in 48 short minutes life, death, love, romance, murder, forgiveness, anguish, hope, loss and magic.
-Popmatters.com

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Nico Muhly was born in Vermont in 1981 and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Columbia University in 2003 with a degree in English Literature and received a Masters in Music from the Julliard School one year later.

Since receiving his degrees, he has amassed a string of commissions, collaborations, and premieres that would be notable for a composer twice his age. He has written orchestral pieces for the Boston Pops, the Chicago Symphony MusicNOW, the American Symphony Orchestra, the Julliard Orchestra, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Orchestra, and the American Ballet Theatre (for choreographer Benjamin Millepied). His works have been premiered on the BBC and at New York’s St. Thomas Church, Carnegie Hall, the Whitney Museum and the New York Public Library – the latter, a special collaboration with designer/illustrator Maira Kalman in honor of her illustrated edition of The Elements of Style. Finally, Muhly has worked extensively with Philip Glass as editor, keyboardist, and conductor for numerous film and stage projects, and contributed to projects by a striking constellation of pop figures, among them Rufus Wainwright, Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), Björk, Teitur, Will Oldham, and The National.

These many personal connections highlight one of the more important aspects of Muhly’s musical life – in a word, community. The cast of characters who appear on Mothertongue include his closest collaborators -- violist Nadia Sirota, folk singer Sam Amidon and, last but not least, Icelandic producer Valgeir Sigurðsson. Sigurðsson’s and Muhly’s view on musical relationships was, in part, the inspiration for Bedroom Community, the label Sigurðsson founded and which created both Mothertongue and its predecessor, Speaks Volumes, Muhly’s 2006 debut.