Negative Press Project + Friction Quartet - Cycles I

GA Russell · 2025-11-24T23:02:48Z

Negative Press Project

Delivers Its Most Accomplished Album Yet with

"Cycles I,"

Set for Release January 30

On Envelopmental Music

Album Features 12 Original Compositions

Played by the Northern California Octet

In Collaboration with Innovative String Ensemble

Friction Quartet

November 24, 2025

Negative Press Project reaches new heights of ambition with Cycles I, their fifth album, arriving January 30 via Envelopmental Music. Though scattered to the four winds, the San Francisco Bay–founded chamber jazz octet came back together to realize 12 compositions by pianist Ruthie Dineen and bassist Andrew Lion—and joined forces with the world-renowned cutting-edge string ensemble Friction Quartet (violinists Otis Harriel and Kevin Rogers, violist Stephanie Bibbo, and cellist Doug Machiz). The result is a stunning coalescence of post-bop jazz and postmodern classical music, both simultaneously at their most adventurous and most accessible.

Accessibility shouldn’t be taken to mean lack of complexity. Cycles I is especially complex in terms of the emotional landscape it evokes and explores. Dineen and Lion began creating these pieces during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they reflect the complicated, unsettled era and world in which the composers found themselves.

“Even going through the writing process, we were living the experiences, the massive cultural collective experience, that we were writing about,” Lion says.

Ruthie Dineen & Andrew Lion

The album’s recording was concluded in 2022; in the time since, our era and world only become more complicated and unsettled. This makes the music all the more relevant and urgent. We can feel this in, for instance, the tension-fraught interplay with which Friction begin Lion’s album-opening “Shoten Zenjin (Morning Arrives for Aya)” before Dineen and saxophonists Chris Sullivan, Lyle Link, and Tony Peebles provide sweet but hard-earned release.

Beginning with Schwartz's drum passage, Dineen's "Aelorean" drives the program forward with precise momentum, punctuated by Peebles's coruscating tenor solo and well-timed response from Friction Quartet's strings. Conceived on October 21, 2015, the very date the DeLorean jumps to in the hit film Back to the Future, its title is a play on the tune's Aeolian-mode foundation.

It continues in the prodding pulse of Lion’s “Waltz in Progress,” with the bassist’s ever-so-slight lag behind drummer Isaac Schwartz’s ride cymbal beat reminding us of the cautious hesitation that’s become a feature of our everyday lives; in the troubled yet hopeful dissonances that horns (saxes plus trumpeter Rafa Postel) and strings share in Lion’s “Libre”; and in the undaunted fatigue guitarist Luis Salcedo channels into his gorgeous solo on Dineen’s “Miles to Go.”

Cycles I finds its apex in the pianist’s “Hold and Keep This Flower,” which includes a haunting prelude for Friction Quartet before opening onto a delicate soprano saxophone recitation from Link. He is soon joined by Peebles, Sullivan, and Postel in a quartet movement, then acts as featured soloist against sensitive ensemble accompaniment (including the strings).

Special guests Ivan Arteaga (clarinet), Patrick Malabuyo (trombone), and Ami Molinelli (percussion) also make their voices heard across Cycles I, adding yet deeper and more ambitious layers of texture and collaborative music-making to the work. “That’s my favorite thing in the world, pulling people together who are serious to create group identity,” Dineen says. “There are many voices, but we all come together to tell one story.”

L. to r.: Luis Salcedo, g; Lyle Link, ss/as/ts; Andrew Lion, b; Rafa Postel, tpt;

Ruthie Dineen, p/key; Chris Sullivan, as; Tony Peebles, ts; Isaac Schwartz, d.

Negative Press Project is an eight-piece ensemble sprung from the meeting of minds of two Northern California natives and California Jazz Conservatory (CJC) graduates, bassist-composer Andrew Lion and pianist-composer Ruthie Dineen.

Lion, born June 29, 1970 in Oakland, was raised on the rock and pop records in his parents’ collection—but also found his way to jazz via the fusion stylings of the Pat Metheny Group. As a professional electric and upright bass player (after flirtations with piano and guitar in his youth), Lion has worked in all of those milieus. He is a founding member of the rock band Spoke, is a contributor to the category-defying pop band Oona and the pop-rock singer-songwriter/ guitarist Jeff Campbell, and has toured with Brazilian jazz multi-instrumentalist Marcos Silva. He currently resides in Bend, Oregon.

Dineen was born September 7, 1982, into a Salvadoran-American family in Fairfield, California. She discovered music at an early age, and studied classical and jazz piano through her adolescence and into her undergraduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She also spent time studying abroad in Chile and living in Costa Rica, where she deepened her musical knowledge and appreciation. Back Stateside, Dineen earned a master’s degree in social work and a bachelor’s from CJC and began working as a music teacher for community engagement. She began working in 2011 for the East Bay Center for Performing Arts in Richmond, California, where she now serves as executive director. She also works with the bands Bululú, the D/L Sextet, and RDL+.

Lion and Dineen cofounded NPP in 2013 as a sextet. Two years later they recorded their debut album seeevileyes/civilize. Their follow-up, 2017’s Eternal Life | Jeff Buckley Songs and Sounds, was also their breakthrough recording. The band expanded to an octet for 2019’s withIN, 2023’s The Victorious Sessions, and Cycles I, their fifth release. Cycles II is already a work in progress.

Negative Press Project has booked an Oregon tour for June, taking in Salem (Christo’s, Thurs. 6/11), Eugene (The Jazz Station, Fri. 6/12), and Bend (Commonwealth Pub, Wed. 6/17).