Bright Shiny Things Releases The News From Utopia, JACK Quartet Violinist Austin Wulliman's Debut Album as a Composer

Media Contact: Paula Mlyn
Email: paula@a440arts.com
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 23, 2023

BRIGHT SHINY THINGS RELEASES THE NEWS FROM UTOPIA, JACK QUARTET VIOLINIST AUSTIN WULLIMAN’S DEBUT ALBUM AS A COMPOSER

NEW YORK, NY–On September 15, 2023, Bright Shiny Things releases The News From Utopia [BSTC-0192], JACK Quartet violinist Austin Wulliman’s debut album as a composer. All tracks were composed, recorded and mixed by the “gifted, adventuresome violinist” (Chicago Tribune), with assistance on two tracks by JACK Quartet cellist Jay Campbell. Wulliman credits British novelist Zadie Smith’s short story “The Lazy River” with inspiring the final track by the same name, and ideas from that story percolate through the whole album. The violinist also provides, in the liner notes, a series of dream-like images that motivate the musical imagery of each movement. The News From Utopia is available for pre-order here.

Though divided into six titled sections with distinct characters, the music of The News From Utopia continues from start to finish without interruption. A parallel might be drawn to Zadie Smith’s funny and provocative story “The Lazy River,” which concerns a circular body of water with an artificial current in a hotel in southern Spain, but her first three long paragraphs avoid that real-world scenario in favor of a metaphor for the human tendency to slip into lethargy and meaninglessness. In Wulliman’s liner notes, he details how the story influenced his final track: “Its imagery, content, and form were vital for that composition, which spurred the structure and sonic profile of the entire record.”

ABOUT THE MUSIC

Wulliman’s imagery for “The Docks” reads: “I was on the docks in the dry air at midnight, heartbeat dominating my senses as I looked out into the desert. When my eyes came to focus, I saw the stars reflecting on what had always been the sea.” Many of these images have musical analogues: the “heartbeat” is a slightly anxious-sounding ostinato with bouts of arrhythmia, the “dry air” a calculated spareness of string vibration and an intentional friction in the tuning, the desert a creaking of wood and dry plucked strings. The arrival of the stars and the sea is signaled by a complete sonic transformation, a lullaby that washes away every trace of accumulated anxiety. 

An echo of that lullaby also wistfully ends the final movement, “The Lazy River.” In Smith’s story, the ocean is deliberately ignored as a sinister and uncontrollable unknown, but in the violinist’s music it is a more active presence: it looms forebodingly so that an initial optimism has to struggle to ignore the power of the tide and the falling veil of night. The other movements further illustrate the range of Wullliman’s inspirations: “BLINK” is a short entr’acte depicting a rude awakening, “The Fool’s Heralds” a waking nightmare of demagoguery and deliberately unidiomatic string fanfares. “Your Discovery Page” starts with an image of pixels, but the musical interpretation is far from contained and orderly—these pixels cascade in all directions, building an image in one place even as it swiftly disintegrates in another. The central title track, “The News From Utopia,” has a self-referential way of continually folding in on itself like the repetitions of the 24-hour news cycle. 

Wulliman’s images are sometimes bleak, but one is nonetheless left with the feeling that an artistic optimism pervades the entire album. His liner notes credit as inspirations his wife, flautist Alex Sopp, and the other members of the JACK Quartet “from whom I’ve learned an immeasurable amount, most importantly to follow my own unadvisable whims.” After citing the inspiration of “my father’s meticulously kept and bountiful garden as well as my mother’s uniquely colorful and playfully designed quilts” he adds: “Anything I create musically is made with the aim of having many voices singing together, the way it was when I was growing up.”

ABOUT AUSTIN WULLIMAN

Violinist, composer and educator Austin Wulliman embodies the imagined and empathizes with the absurd through sounds both familiar and radical, telling stories with a limitless passion for tuning cries from every corner of the human capacity to hear. He is a member of JACK Quartet, called “the nation’s most important quartet” by the New York Times, recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year, and performing at the Berlin Philharmonie, Vienna Konzerthaus, and Carnegie Hall as well as teaching at the Banff Centre, Lucerne Festival, and the Mannes School of Music. As soloist, he has given the American premiere of works by Kaija Saariaho and played at the Southbank Centre, Aspen Music Festival, and Wigmore Hall. He has collaborated with a panoply of composers and performers, advocating for the music of now, including the likes of Philip Glass, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, George Lewis, Conrad Tao, Tyshawn Sorey, Barbara Hannigan and John Zorn.

Photograph of Austin Wulliman: ©Alex Sopp