In one sense, this 8-track collaboration between Pulitzer prize-winning composer-vocalist Caroline Shaw and Grammy award-winning cellist-composer Andrew Yee is a snapshot of a friendship.
The title – Or, the Whale – comes from Melville’s Moby-Dick, and in particular from director Wu Tsang’s 2022 silent film version for which Shaw and Yee provided the score. A condensed suite combines cello, electronics and ethereal vocals in a haunting, folk-infused evocation of the novel, whale song and all.
Much here is similarly imaginative. Yee’s uplifting ‘The Trees of Green-Wood’ channels Meredith Monk as Shaw sings a catalogue of trees organised by diameter of trunk: the greater the girth, the louder the music.
Tag Archive: Caroline Shaw
The debut album from cinematic electro-pop duo Ringdown, featuring Danni Lee Parpan and Pulitzer and Grammy winner Caroline Shaw, Lady on the Bike. The album celebrates the feeling of possibility in myriad forms: the possibility of love; the possibility of creating connection and community in a world trying to pull those things apart; the possibility of making music in new ways. This feeling of possibility glimmers like a disco ball throughout the album, radiating with a sense of movement, transformation, and wonder. “Ecstatically blissful,” says Night After Night’s Steve Smith. “There haven’t been too many duos like this one,” says Oregon ArtsWatch’s Matthew Neil Andrews. “If Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush had made a whole album of songs…