Program note:

This fall, Cantaloupe Music will release Julia Wolfe's Dark Full Ride: Music in Multiples, her first album since 2003. It consists of four new compositions, each clocking in at over 15 minutes, each written for multiples of individual instruments - nine bagpipes, four drum sets, six pianos, and eight double basses. Wolfe says, ''Like staring for a long time at a Rothko painting, I imagined each of these pieces as an exploration of one color. But in truth an instrument isn't really single timbre. There are a myriad of worlds within each sound.''

Working closely with the performers during the composing process, Wolfe uncovers a never-before-heard music. For example, while writing ''LAD'' she discovered the initial drone produced while filling the bagpipe with air, using that as the piece's introduction. The first seven minutes of the title track ''Dark Full Ride'' use only a drum set's hi-hats. ''my lips from speaking'' builds on the piano riff from a classic R&B song to showcase the instrument's ferocity. Finally ''Stronghold'' shows the bass isn't just about low end.

Says Wolfe: ''With each piece I tried to dive into a psychedelic landscape, at one multilayered, fractured, ecstatic, silent, driving, cacophonous, and direct.''

Program note:

Review
''This string quartet recording demonstrates her ability to inject new energy into old forms and avoid easy categorization.''
—Josef Woodard, Los Angeles Times

Bang on a Can Co-Founder Julia Wolfe has turned the string quartet world upside down with these ferociously fresh quartets. Played by three of Americas finest young groups, the quartets have been exciting audiences, quartets and critics for the last ten years. Defying classification, Wolfe turns the string quartet into a relentless high voltage vehicle of expression. Beautifully recorded and produced by Michael Reisman (Philip Glass).
—Cantaloupe Music

Program note:

The ground-breaking Sony recordings reissued. Too funky for the academy, the Bang on a Can All-Stars emerged from the scruffy environs of downtown New York playing a new kind of music, with a new kind of energy, for a new kind of audience. This is the music that made them famous, newly packaged and remastered onto one 74- minute disc.

Music by Nick Didkovsky, Michael Gordon, Annie Gosfield, David Lang, Lois V Vierk, Julia Wolfe, and Evan Ziporyn.

Program note:

LIMITED EDITION CD + DELUXE 48-PAGE FULL-COLOR BOOK Chock full of drawings from acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist and Pantheon Books author Ben Katchor

The Carbon Copy Building is a dynamic and visually stunning trip through the gritty underside of urban life. Words and drawings by celebrated New Yorker comic-strip artist and recent MacArthur Grant recipient Ben Katchor are brought vividly to life by music from Bang on a Can Co-Artistic Directors Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe.

Rock band meets opera, The Carbon Copy Building is a full-length work for four singers and winds, keys, guitar, and drums; and is the first major collaborative work from the Bang on a Can Co-Artistic Directors. The revolutionary show won the Village Voice 2000 OBIE Award for Best New American Work, and embraces the dark, witty humor of Katchor, known for his cult classic underground comic, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. After many years, the work is finally out on CD, accompanied by Katchor’s beautiful illustrated libretto; in a limited edition hard-bound Book+CD case.

''The Carbon Copy Building is made to be read as much as heard... [the music is] translucent and unhurried, it allows the audience to linger and contemplate Mr. Katchor’s urban otherworld.''
—The New York Times

Program note:

Lost Objects is a musical exploration of the meaning of memory. With the spine of a baroque oratorio layered with the muscle of modern times, it is a powerful monument to the loss of people, things, rituals, ideas.

In their second major collaborative performance project, genre-defying composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe team up with polyphonic writer Deborah Artman to work a strange and beautiful alchemy of text and sound. The baroque virtuosity of the legendary Concerto Köln is challenged and stretched by the hard-edged electric Bang on a Can Lost Objects Ensemble and the avant-turntables of DJ Spooky. In the same way that oratorios such as Handel's Messiah were intended to be staged, the 3 vocal soloists and 30 voice chorus of LOST OBJECTS inhabit a mythic and beautiful stage world, under the direction of the acclaimed, award-winning director François Girard (''32 Short Films About Glenn Gould,'' ''The Red Violin'').

The result is LOST OBJECTS, a haunting, hallucinatory and humane musictheater piece for baroque orchestra, rock ensemble (electric guitar, electric bass, keyboard and drums), live DJ remix, solo voices and choir. The unique weave of sounds combines the resonance of animal gut and wood with the ethereal blend of soprano and countertenor voices mixed with the edgy force of amplified rock instruments and drums. ''LOST OBJECTS is a prayer hall, a hymn but also an invention,'' writes Ms. Artman. ''There is a narrative, somewhat sacred, but it is a fractured meditation. In the tenuous and hurried climate of the times we live in now, LOST OBJECTS asks us to pause and consider the grace bestowed upon each thing, person, animal and idea, the ordinary and the not-so-ordinary lost objects of our shared and vanishing culture.''

Creators
Music by Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe
Libretto by Deborah Artman
Directed by François Girard
Stage Design by François Seguin
Conducted by Daniel Reuss
Sound Design by Jody Elff
Lighting Design by Jane Cox
Projection Design by Peter Flaherty

Performers
Bang on a Can Lost Objects Ensemble
Concerto Köln
Elizabeth Keusch, soprano
Andrew Watts, Daniel Bubeck, countertenors
Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky

Produced by Bang on a Can

Review
...a score that examines loss as an inevitable consequence of historical development and as an enduring subject of human fascination...It is a huge canvas, and the composers fill it with a rhythmically assertive post-Minimalist score, written for an orchestra of Baroque-period instruments, a rock band, a chorus and soloists, and a D.J., who creates live electronic mixes as interludes.

—Allan Kozinn, The New York Times

Program note:

Gritty spirituality and blistering performances from the electrifying Bang on a Can All-Stars. Prayers, incantations and miracle cures from edgy urbanites in search of the soul. Music by Glenn Branca, Arnold Dreyblatt, Michael Gordon, Phil Kline, and Julia Wolfe.

''Number 1 CD of 2001'' - Alan Kozinn, The New York Times