Albums

Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass (Mar 2011)
Dominant Curve (Apr 2010)
Silent City (Sep 2008)
Passport (Jul 2008)

Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass

Dominant Curve

Dominant Curve celebrates the pioneering vision of Claude Debussy and his ongoing influence on music today. Centered on a fresh and vivid interpretation of the composer's great String Quartet in g minor, the album also includes four like-minded works created for Brooklyn Rider within the past year by Kojiro Umezaki (Japan), Dmitri Yanov-Yanovski (Uzbekistan), Justin Messina (Brooklyn-based composer, electro-acoustic arrangement of John Cage's In a Landscape), and Brooklyn Rider violinist, Colin Jacobsen.

The extraordinary fin de siècle world of Claude Debussy and his friendship with many well-known musicians, writers, and artists of his day serves as a model for the multi-faceted community of Brooklyn Rider. Dominant Curve honors this not only through its musical collaborations, but also by featuring Boston-based artist Lennie Peterson, whose visual responses to each of the five works on this album comprise the accompanying booklet.

Dominant Curve is released on In a Circle Records. We hope you enjoy this album!

“Excellent”
—Huffington Post

“Superb”
—Chicago Reader

“One of the most inventive and thrilling albums of the year”
—TimeOut Chicago

“The precision and control in the playing is stunning.”
—Toronto Star

“Brooklyn Rider shows deep artistic maturity and a spiritual essence bordering on the psychedelic...Exciting and fresh, Dominant Curve is full of worthwhile new material as well as a valid and imaginative interpretation of the Debussy string quartet.”
—Northwest Reverb

“...Hypnotically beautiful, stunningly imaginative...”
—Lucid Culture

“The Cage arrangement is beautifully cosmic...”
—The Mail and Globe

Silent City

Passport

We are happy to announce the official release of our debut album, Passport! The album is self-produced by the four of us, and is released on a label Johnny started just a few months ago - In a Circle Records. We feel a great sense of ownership with this project, and we are very excited to share this album with all of you.

Passport begins with a set of Armenian Folk Songs that were collected by one of the most revered figures in Armenian cultural history, Komitas Vardapet. An ethnomusicologist and an Orthodox priest, Komitas is largely responsible for preserving Armenian Folk music. The beautiful arrangements for string quartet were made by Sergey Aslamazian. "Brooklesca" was written by our in-house composer, violinist Colin Jacobsen. It is inspired by our collective experiences as members of YoYo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble, which have included extensive exploration and performing of Gypsy and Persian music. "La Muerte Chiquita" is a song made famous by a Mexican rock group, Cafe Tacuba. Here is a version for string quartet in a gorgeous arrangement by Osvaldo Golijov. "Plume" & "Crosstown" were written by Ljova- a great young composer/arranger, who has recently collaborated with Osvaldo Golijov on the score for Francis Ford Coppola's latest film, "Youth without Youth". These are soulful, bluesy tunes that evoke cinematic moments in the style of Pedro Almodovar.

We hope you have as much fun listening to this album as we did recording it!