The two first forged their deep collaboration in 2017 with “ASMR,” off Ian Chang’s debut solo EP Spiritual Leader, a piece scribed by NPR’s All Songs Considered as “an arresting instrumental piece inspired by the inexplicable chills that sometimes run down your back.” There’s a spine-tingling sequel in Floating Into Infinity, in the form of the album’s first single “ASMR II,” which drops today.
The composition utilizes a vanguard sampling program for drummers called Sensory Percussion, a machine learning technology that gives Chang,“the ability to teach the software the nuances of my acoustic drumming in order to convert the drum kit into a hyper sensitive sampler.”
It’s a technique that allowed for the altering of auditory perception through manipulation and processing of pre-recorded sounds where, as Brody describes it, “simply slowing down, speeding up or presenting fragments of a particular sample can lead to completely new auditory worlds, while also providing a sense of connection to sounds from the past.” A connection that Brody calls Sonic DNA, “a chain of smaller sound sources that make up distinct fundamental characteristics of a work.” The combination of those two ideas allowed Brody and Chang to “translate the physicality of drumming into customizable sonic environments with software that is able to learn the parameters of the drum to understand where and how you're hitting the drum giving the performer interpretive freedom.”
“I would be surprised if anyone who's heard the music would guess that it's written to be performed on drums, and I think that speaks to the unique experience of performing this music,” says Chang in describing Floating Into Infinity. “The physicality of playing the drums feels familiar, but the way my limbs relate to the sweeping textures that I'm triggering feels completely new.”
As Brody created the sonic structure of Floating Into Infinity by weaving fragments of larger structures and assigning parameters, he explains that he couldn’t help but relate this to our own physical structure and “how we are made up of the elements of the universe, composed of trillions of cells, all with their own specialized function and an organ system that works together to keep us alive.”
“Brody's command of texture and sound design is at the heart of his compositions,” describes Chang. “I really love how this body of work always feels like it's constantly moving and bubbling on a micro level, while breathing in slow motion on a macro level, like a forest.
All music composed by Benjamin Louis Brody except
ASMR II by Ian Chang & Benjamin Louis Brody
All music originally premiered & performed by Ian Chang
using Sensory Percussion
Album produced by Benjamin Louis Brody
Mixed & Mastered by Ariel Loh
Artwork by Matt Andres
Design direction by Benjamin Louis Brody
Samples originally created by Benjamin Louis Brody except
kick drum in ASMR II by Ian Chang

Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered, the fourth record in a partnership between New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records, will be released on September 25, 2020. A video for “Sanctus/Benedictus” from the Mass, made by Deborah Johnson/CandyStations, is now available and is the first of six videos created for the project.
Snider’s Mass, with a libretto by poet/writer Nathaniel Bellows, is a celebration of, and an elegy for, the natural world—animals, plants, insects, the planet itself—an appeal for greater awareness, urgency, and action. Originally commissioned by Trinity Church Wall Street, this recording features the English vocal ensemble Gallicantus conducted by Gabriel Crouch.
The six-movement Mass for the Endangered is a rumination on the concept of the traditional Catholic Mass, its fidelity enhanced by Snider’s interpolation of traditional Latin text for the Gloria, Sanctus/Benedictus, and parts of the Kyrie, Credo, and Agnus Dei. For the album art, Bellows created an illustrated triptych of endangered flora and fauna that evoke medieval Christian altarpieces and stained-glass windows.
Snider explains, “The origin of the Mass is rooted in humanity’s concern for itself, expressed through worship of the divine—which, in the Catholic tradition, is a God in the image of man. Nathaniel and I thought it would be interesting to take the Mass’s musical modes of spiritual contemplation and apply them to concern for non-human life—animals, plants, and the environment. There is an appeal to a higher power—for mercy, forgiveness, and intervention—but that appeal is directed not to God but rather to Nature itself.”
Growing up in Princeton, NJ, one-time home of the American Boychoir School, Snider attended that venerable institution’s co-ed summer camp as a youth: “I attended for five summers. I fell in love with choral singing there, and later sang with the Princeton High School Choir, which was at the time one of the most celebrated high school choirs in the country. These experiences were profoundly formative for me, and I learned a lot of the choral repertoire. I felt very at home in that music, but I hadn’t yet had a chance to explore it in my writing in a significant way. The Mass was my first large choral commission, and I was thrilled to immerse myself in memories of singing the Mozart, Brahms, and Fauré Requiems, the Palestrina and Byrd Masses, the Bach chorales.
“Rather than consciously upend those traditions,” she continues, “I wanted to open the gates in my mind between centuries-old European vocal traditions and those of more recent American vernacular persuasion, and write from a place where differing thoughts about line, text, form, and expression could co-exist.”
Recently called a “significant voice on the American music landscape” by the Philadelphia Inquirer and “an important representative of twenty-first century trends in composition” by New York Classical Review, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider writes music of direct expression and vivid narrative that has been hailed as “rapturous” by the New York Times, “groundbreaking” by the Boston Globe, and “poignant, deeply personal” by the New Yorker. With an ear for the poetic and the architectural, Snider’s music draws upon a variety of influences to render a nuanced command of immersive storytelling. Of her orchestral song cycle, Penelope, Pitchfork said: “Snider’s music lives in … an increasingly populous inter-genre space that, as of yet, has produced only a few clear, confident voices. Snider is perhaps the most sophisticated of them all.”
Snider’s works have been commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Kansas City Symphony, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra; the Residentie Orkest Den Haag, Aarhus Symfoniorkester, Britten Sinfonia, and National Arts Centre Orchestra; violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, percussionist Colin Currie, and vocalist Shara Nova (formerly Worden); eighth blackbird, A Far Cry, Ensemble Signal, The Knights, and yMusic; Roomful of Teeth, Cantus, and Trinity Wall Street Choir, among many others. Penelope and Unremembered, her first two LPs, earned critical acclaim from NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Nation, and Pitchfork. Her music is published by G. Schirmer, Inc.

Composer and performer Molly Joyce will release her debut full-length album, Breaking and Entering, on June 5 through New Amsterdam Records. The album features Joyce cultivating disability within the human body through a series of electro-acoustic works written and performed by Joyce on her instrument of choice — the electric vintage toy organ. Breaking and Entering is part of New Amsterdam’s digital-only Windmill Series imprint and available exclusively to New Amsterdam Records Bandcamp subscribers starting April 8; all others can pre-order the album here.
Breaking and Entering is a highly personal album through which Joyce explores disability as a creative source. She was involved in a car accident at the age of seven that impaired her left hand. As Joyce grew older and pursued her love of music, she searched for an instrument that wouldn’t limit her body or creativity — and found it in a vintage Magnus electric toy organ purchased on eBay. The toy organ’s unique design of chord buttons on the left and keyboard on the right is “made for her body, made for her form, made for her deform,” says Joyce. It engages her disability on a compositional and performative level, allowing her to change from thinking about what notes won’t sound or keys won’t press, but rather the notes that will sound, keys that will press, and experience possibilities from that fundamental difference.
Joyce uses the toy organ to ask questions of herself, and of all of us, on Breaking and Entering: What does it mean to break and enter into a new body, new disability, and new identity? What does one lose and what does one gain? And when movement, sensation, and nerves leave one’s body, what emerges in their place — physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually? Joyce developed the music and lyrics that explore these questions over several years through grants, residencies and live performances, along with disability studies and engagement with disabled activists, artists, and scholars. She uses these works to push against stigma and celebrate a singular body instead of hiding it away, creating a new social imaginary that values body complexity instead of conformity, and vitality rather than normality.
The intimacy of Breaking and Entering is reflected in its recording process as well; the album was self-recorded by Joyce on a SM58 mic, and features her performing vocals, organ, and MIDI sounds from Sibelius 7 software. The works feature four different Magnus electric vintage toy organs, all from the 1960s and 70s and purchased from eBay. The album was produced and engineered by Michael Hammond (of No Lands), and mastered by Joe Lambert.
Joyce is also active in supporting other disabled artists, and has worked with Disability Arts Online and the National Institute of Art & Disabilities Center in Richmond, CA. She gave a moving talk on her experience with disability at TEDxMidAtlantic in October 2017, watch it here (
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This album was made possible with a Lift Grant from the Pittsburgh Greater Arts Council and support from artist residencies worldwide, including Headlands Center for the Arts (California), AIR Niederösterreich (Krems an der Donau, Austria), De Link (Tilburg, Netherlands), The Watermill Center (New York), Villa Sträuli (Winterthur, Switzerland), Embassy of Foreign Artists (Geneva, Switzerland), Swatch Art Peace Hotel (Shanghai, China), and Halcyon Arts Lab (Washington, DC).
Joyce’s debut EP Lean Back and Release was also released on the New Amsterdam Records Windmill Series in 2017.
credits
released June 5, 2020

“Dark twin, meet your light twin.” That’s how musicians and best friends John Niekrasz and Luke Wyland were first introduced to each other in 2007. It’s an apt description of the duality and synergy of their musical project Methods Body. Using keys/electronics and percussion, the two maximize the duo configuration to create music at once primal and futuristic. Overflowing with polyrhythms and layers of microtonal melodies, the two suites on Methods Body’s self-titled debut conjure a sense of traveling through space and time to a prismatic, post-human landscape.

New Amsterdam Records announces Brooklyn-based iT Boy’s The Nail House EP. Each of the EP's luscious 3 tracks is built around a cassette loop. iT Boy’s Theo Baer explains, “most of the sounds recorded onto each loop derive their tonality from musical cryptograms of words, phrases, and names of a specific significance. These compositions are a portrait of my deepest inspirations and the personal hardships that have shaped my artistic journey.”
Using the Chinese term for a home whose owners refuse to bow to the imposing pressures of real estate development and gentrification, the album’s title refers to the home and work space in which Baer composed and captured the works on the EP. Over the course of a year of writing and recording this project, he writes, “my home and work studio of five years became a “Nail House” in its own right. I was finally evicted shortly after finishing these works.”
With “The Nail House EP,” Baer’s response to these circumstances is an emotional narrative built with sophisticated textures and moody, meditative gravitas.
credits
released May 15, 2020
All music composed and performed by Theo Baer (synths, keyboards, trumpet, drum machine, tape loops)
Deities: Zachary Paul (violin)
Clew: Ed Bear (baritone saxophone, electronics), Trevor Hamilton (vocals), saxophone recorded by Alex Weston
Mixed by Todd Schied
Mastered by Taylor Deupree (12k mastering)
MUCH THANKS TO:
Ben Brody, Nick Lenchner, Glossy Bohemond, Kyna Marie and Krysta Brayer, William Brittelle and everyone at New Amsterdam, Greta and Clay and Ace and Lo and Casey and Jude and Bille and Aliyah and Amy and all those who helped me make it through another year
Dedicated to Dad and Mom

Featuring works from Missy Mazzoli, "one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York" (The New York Times), Pulitzer Prize-winning Caroline Shaw, Gabriella Smith and Paul Wiancko.
ALBUM CREDITS
yMusic is:
Alex Sopp, flutes and vocals
Hideaki Aomori, clarinets
CJ Camerieri, trumpet and horn
Rob Moose, violin and guitar
Nadia Sirota, viola
Gabriel Cabezas, cello
Recorded at National Sawdust
Engineered, edited and mixed by Alejandro Venguer
Assisted by Gintas Norvila
Mastered by Richard Dodd
Cover art by Alex Sopp
Album design by David Stith

Haitian-American composer, flutist, and vocalist Nathalie Joachim will release her debut solo album, Fanm d'Ayiti, on August 30, 2019. The album, which translates to Women of Haiti in English, shows Joachim exploring her Haitian heritage and celebrating the songs and stories of some of Haiti’s most iconic yet under-recognized female artists. The songs on Fanm d'Ayiti were all written or arranged by Joachim and feature her performing on vocals, flute, and electronics alongside the Grammy-nominated string ensemble Spektral Quartet.

Caroline Adelaide Shaw is an American violinist, singer and composer. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for her a cappella piece Partita for 8 Voices.

Alula is the new album from Brooklyn-based composer Caroline Davis. The record is available exclusively through New Amsterdam’s Bandcamp subscription as part of the Windmill Series, a new digitally-focused set of releases for subscribers in addition to our existing release schedule. Subscribe today to receive the album, which will be released on all other platforms in February 2019.
Formed in Brooklyn in 2016, Alula was born out of several duo performances between Caroline Davis and Gregory Saunier. Internal monologues resulted in the addition of pianist/keyboardist Matt Mitchell, who Davis has worked with in other contexts. Alula’s debut album features original pieces by Davis, whole-heartedly motivated by the study of an anterior digit on a bird’s wing. The alula wing functions as a locomotive during flight and landing, and has specific rhythmic functions, which is of central concern on this self-titled album.
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On an edifying flight through universe #99, our bodies forward motioning, weaving, dealing, scheming, teaming—we fall. Time and Time Again, we are rescued by essences we dare not translate, but feel. “They are real,” we pontificate, and fear sets in. We depend on these essences? Why yes, it’s true. Open space::run like the wind// jump//fly////our freedom(s) demand that we try until we make it aerial. We are soaring.
credits
released May 10, 2019
Recorded at Figure 8 (Brooklyn NY), December 14th 2017 by Sam Owens
Edited by Connor Grant
Mixed and Mastered by Gregory Saunier
Produced by Caroline Davis
Artwork by Robert Pollard
Design and Layout by Audible Paint
Caroline Davis / Alto Saxophone, Voice
Matt Mitchell / Prophet 6 Synthesizer, Modular Synth, ARP Synthesizer
Gregory Saunier / Drums, Percussion, Voice