Exclusive album preview: Big Farm on New Amsterdam Records
According to the band itself,
“Big Farm is a place where serious counterpoint can meet burlesque, earnestness meet abandon; a place where they can kick it or take it to tea, reflect, attack, mourn, dance, pray, or mock with ease or determination, joy or fervor, using any and all means necessary. This world is a big farm – lots of different crops, changing weather, livestock, and a duck pond for good measure.”
Big Farm
Big Farm is Grammy winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist vocalist-lyricist Rinde Eckert; electric bassist Mark Haanstra; Grammy winner and pioneering composer/guitarist Steven Mackey; and celebrated percussionist Jason Treuting (So Percussion). Thanks to our friends at New Amsterdam Records, we are able to offer an exclusive album preview on I CARE IF YOU LISTEN! The eponymous debut album will be out on May 28, and this preview will stream until May 27, midnight EST.
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My first encounter with Dan Visconti’s music was courtesy of the Aeolus Quartet and their debut album, 
If television’s IFC produced operas in addition to off-kilter films and quirky sitcoms, composer Jason Cady’s Happiness is the Problem might be a prominent member of the program lineup. Released on January 15 via composer Aaron Siegel’s LockStep Records, the opera boasts a decidedly eccentric plot: three unemployed roommates living Greenpoint, Brooklyn find an unconventional way to overcome their financial woes.
In 1904 the Swiss adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt (born 1877) drowned in a flash flood in the Sahara, only 27 years old. For four years she’d traversed the desert on horseback, dressed as a man, smoking, drinking, and even gaining access to a Sufi brotherhood. She documented her travels in journals and short stories, and her last writings had to be pulled from the water and dried. Eberhardt inspired many artists, such as Missy Mazzoli, whose opera Song from the Uproar was premiered at the Kitchen New York in February 2012, and released on cd eight months later by New Amsterdam.
In the program notes for the song cycle death speaks (recording released on April 30 via Cantaloupe Music) composer David Lang asks, “What would it be like to put together an ensemble of successful indie composer-performers and invite them back into classical music, the world from which they sprang?” Lang answered this rhetorical question with a score written specifically for an elite coterie—guitarist Bryce Dessner of the rock band The National, violinist/vocalist Owen Pallett, pianist Nico Muhly, and My Brightest Diamond frontwoman Shara Worden.
