Composer William Brittelle?

[JSngry]

My curiosity has been piqued enough that I'm about to drop all my Bandcamp gift cards on his catalog.

Is anybody here further enough along into his work to encourage me to go ahead, or to stop before I waste my money?

I've just heard three pieces but they have been a STRONG three pieces.

Also/apparently, he's onf of/the founder of the New Amsterdam Records label, which itself has been putting out stuff to which I have found myself enjoying at a somewhat elevated level.

Thoughts? Experiences? Recipes? Pictures?

[mjazzg]

Never heard of him but your post piqued my interest so listening to 'Dido's Lament (Revisited)' as an introduction.  Not what i expected although I don't know what i expected.

Which pieces have you listened to?

[JSngry]

I said three, it's actually four - "Shimmering Desert" and "The Collusus" (from The Colorado Soundtrack), plus "High Done No Why To" and "Amid the Minotaurs", one from each of the Roomful Of Teeth records.

Roomful Of Teeth has been my gateway drug into this whole scene (and I think it is a scene of sorts at this point, enough different people and works over enough time to call it that). Definitely a lot happening on New Amsterdam Records: https://www.newamrecords.com/discography

Brittelle's Wiki page is interesting, how he got to where he is, musically:

Brittelle was raised in rural North Carolina, and often cites his upbringing in a small southern town with a conservative Christian environment as in opposition to his Brooklyn-based, agnostic Buddhist adulthood, a dissonance reflected in his musical output. Though a trained composer and orchestrator, he has often expressed frustration and dissolution with the world of academia and the classical industry in general. In undergrad, while enrolled at Vanderbilt University as a composition major, Brittelle experienced what he has referred to as a psychotic break, in part as a result of academic artistic constrictions, resulting in him briefly dropping out of school. He has claimed this breakdown, and his subsequent recovery, to be a formative experience in the development of his collage-based, non-developmental, genre-fluid style of composition. After being enrolled in a D.M.A. program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for a period of two years, Brittelle dropped out and re-enrolled privately with his primary teacher, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici, for two subsequent years as a non-matriculating student. In addition to Del Tredici, Brittelle's musical mentors have included Mike Longo (longtime pianist/arranger for Dizzy Gillespie), and punk guitarist Richard Lloyd of Television.

After dropping out of graduate school, Brittelle found himself attracted to pop, hip-hop, and punk music as a way of connecting more viscerally with an audience. This led to fronting a New York post-punk band and working at Sin-e, a heralded New York City music venue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. However following a severe vocal injury he returned to composition, armed with the desire to incorporate disparate and oppositional influences into one vision. Brittelle has stated that his first album "Mohair Time Warp"  written in the wake of his vocal injury, is the first example of work that represented the full breadth of his musical vision.^[2]

Definitely a 21st Century "mindset", I should think! But without skills, nothing. He's definitely got skills.

[mjazzg]

yeah, I read that splurge on his website where it also says,

" the pursuit of transformative catharsis via the assimilation of seemingly oppositional forces. This pursuit takes many forms and extends logically into a genre-fluid, collage-based musical language, a lack of stylistic bias and an emphasis on emotional directness and dramatic gesture often rooted in the highly personal"

 

[JSngry]

A lot of words, but really good results, in my limited experience. Ultimately, seems quite lucid on both counts.

[mjazzg]

Isn't that what used to called "a mash up"?

Stuck on Roomful Of Teeth's (great name for a vocal group) 'Render'

 

[JSngry]

Yeah, I saw Roomful Of Teeth live, and they fucked up my head, big time.

So, door opened...

10 minutes ago, mjazzg said:

Isn't that what used to called "a mash up"?

 

Nah, that's when they put two (or more) existing records together. I t can be glorious or it can be ghastly.

He calls it "collage", which is accurate enough, except he's not , that I can tell, working with pre-existing ingredients. That, imo, ups the ante quite a bit.

[mjazzg]

Did you hear this?

https://corysmythepyroclastic.bandcamp.com/album/accelerate-every-voice

Not the same at all, but...

22 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Yeah, I saw Roomful Of Teeth live, and they fucked up my head, big time.

So, door opened...

Nah, that's when they put two (or more) existing records together. I t can be glorious or it can be ghastly.

He calls it "collage", which is accurate enough, except he's not , that I can tell, working with pre-existing ingredients. That, imo, ups the ante quite a bit.

I hear that

[JSngry]

Hey, i accumulated $100 of Bandcamp credits over Christmas and have been wondering where to drop them...last year it was Tyshawn Sorey (money well spent!). This year, it's going to be this world/scene/etc/whatever. Lots of interesting, non-recreative music happening!