(le) poisson rouge

Just in time for their 10-year anniversary, MONO return with their fifth studio album, the absolutely massive Hymn To The Immortal Wind.

After touring almost non-stop for five years, the band hibernated for over a year to focus solely on writing Hymn. The result is their most thoughtful and eclectic album to date. Written and arranged with a hopeful, romantic narrative in mind, the songs string together like chapters in an epic love story. The music is naturally majestic, with MONO’s trademark wall of noise crashing beautifully against the largest chamber orchestra the band has ever enlisted. The instrumentation is vast, incorporating strings, flutes, organ, piano, glockenspiel and tympani into their standard face-melting set-up.

Recorded to analog tape with long-time friend and producer Steve Albini, there is an intimacy captured here that is at once beautiful and a little terrifying. The creaking of old wooden chairs as the orchestra rocks in their seats (both literally and figuratively), puckered lips rolling along flutes, and even the conductor’s opening cue can be heard during the hauntingly quiet opening moments.

While Hymn continues to mine the cinematic drama inherent in all of MONO's music, the dynamic shifts now come more from dark-to-light instead of quiet-to-loud. The maturity to balance these elements so masterfully has become MONO’s strongest virtue.

The Wordless Music Orchestra is the house band of New York City's Wordless Music series, which was founded by non-musician Ronen Givony in 2006 and has since presented dozens of concerts in churches, museums, nightclubs, and out of doors, pairing artists from the sound worlds of so-called classical, electronic, and rock music. Comprising some of New York's most omnivorous young musicians and members of groups such as Ensemble Signal, Alarm Will Sound, ACME, and Bang on a Can, the orchestra presented its first concerts over two sold-out nights in January 2008 under conductor Brad Lubman with the U.S. premiere of composer and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver, on a program with music of Gavin Bryars and John Adams. In 2009, four months after its world premiere by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Arvo Pärt's Symphony No. 4 ("Los Angeles") had its New York/East Coast premiere by the Wordless Music Orchestra under conductor Jeffrey Milarsky in two sold-out concerts at which the orchestra also performed alongside the Japanese instrumental noise-rock band MONO. These performances with MONO were recorded and released by Brooklyn's Temporary Residence label as Holy Ground: NYC Live with the Wordless Music Orchestra, a limited-edition CD/DVD/LP set. Also in 2009, the orchestra recorded with former Battles multi-instrumentalist Tyondai Braxton for Central Market, the composer's solo debut on Warp Records. In 2010, the Wordless Music Orchestra performed alongside The Hilliard Ensemble and Latvian National Choir as part of Lincoln Center's White Light Festival, with world premiere compositions for orchestra and voices by Kjartan Sveinsson and Jónsi Birgisson of Sigur Rós with his partner, Alex Somers, again under the baton of Jeffrey Milarsky, and the following year at the Guggenheim Museum rotunda in a unique collaboration with visual artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster for Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic. In March 2011, the orchestra embarked with Tyondai Braxton on its first-ever mini-tour--to Alice Tully Hall in New York, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis--to perform new works and world premiere live arrangements from Braxton's Central Market in addition to music by John Adams, Louis Andriessen, and composer/conductor Caleb Burhans. For further information, please visit wordlessmusic.org.