Description
**THIS IS A VINYL LP**
Release Date: 2025
Label: Sinking City Records
Track List
Side A
- Tone
- Strut
- Spreading
- Organic
Side B
- Catharsis
- Diple
- Strut – escuri remix
Notes
Branimir Norac – clarinet
Byron Asher – clarinet
Robby Bowen – drums
Jett Ilagan – electronics/remix
Recorded by Alejandro Salazar in May 2022 at Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, Florida as a part of OneBeat 9.
Mixed and mastered by Alexandria Smith
Gratitude to Kyla Rose-Smith, Elena Moon Park, Alejandro Salazar, Nyokabi Kariuki, Sanaya Ardeshir, Amy Garapic, Chris Botta and the whole OneBeat family. Special thanks to Shahzad Ismaily for instigating.
Cover painting, Falling Candles, by Andy P. Davis
Layout by Mat Keel
Liner Notes:
What is your personal musical tradition? What is your contribution to music? What is the sound of your home?
These are just a few of the prompts that inspired the writing of Clarinets & Drums. In the spring of 2022, Branimir Norac, Byron Asher, and Robby Bowen connected through a OneBeat residency – a US State Department-sponsored international music program where the artistic collaborations routinely exceed the soft diplomacy goals of the program. Stretching and breaking rather that reinforcing borders of all kinds: genres, cultural traditions, nation-states and more. During OneBeat, guest artist Shahzad Ismaily facilitated a text-based composition workshop for residents. Musicians collaborated in small groups: first journaling their responses to the prompts at hand before diving into group improvisations where they transformed words into sound. What began as individual reflection quickly congealed into the collective project of music-making. Out of this process emerged the tracks found here: from Strut’s expression of the elated soundscapes of a New Orleans second line to the sonic reverberations of Croatian traditions encapsulated in Diple.
Across the pieces, one can hear the intermixture of play and gravity – from high energy cacophonies that take you sailing before coming back down to earth’s muted tones to a stormy atmosphere that almost crashes time and time again, but never quite, or the exuberance of life bursting forth. To close, Clarinets & Drums offers us a remix of Strut by Filipino producer Jett Ilagan that moves us into an electronic groove world – where the beats take us away to leave us elsewhere. To a world that might never be replicated but whose brief existence reminds us there are always other possible worlds to be made and found.
— Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, New Orleans, Winter 2025
