All material found in the Press Releases section is provided by parties entirely independent of Musical America, which is not responsible for content.
Press Releases
Apr. 25: Composer Nathan Davis Releases New Album Earthworks on Sono Luminus
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Katy Salomon | Primo Artists | VP, Public Relations
katy@primoartists.com | 646.801.9406
New Album, Earthworks,
Featuring Spoken Word by Sylvia Milo
An Eco-Focused Audio Installation in
which Davis Orchestrates our Relationship
with our Natural and Built Environment
Alongside Members of the International
Contemporary Ensemble
Out April 25, 2025 on Sono Luminus
Physical Review Copies Available Upon Request
“Installation” Out as Instant Gratification Track – March 28
"Nathan Davis writes music that deals deftly and poetically with timbre and sonority.”
– The New York Times
New York, NY (February 25, 2025) – Award-winning American composer and percussionist Nathan Davis, whose work has been described as a “macrocosmic masterpiece” (The Boston Globe), will release his new album Earthworks featuring spoken word by actress Sylvia Milo on Friday, April 25, 2025 on the Sono Luminus label. Earthworks is an innovative eco-focused audio installation that encourages audiences to think critically about the world around them and their impact on the earth. Earthworks investigates our relationship with our natural and built environment, the geologic time cycle of building materials, and the waste stream of construction.
Earthworks was originally produced as a sound installation for the exhibition Planetary Home Improvement: From Just-in-time to Geological Time, conceived by Christine Giorgio, Amelyn Ng, Gabriel Vergara, and Nathan Davis. The exhibition was commissioned by and installed at the VI PER GALLERY in Prague from December 2021 to February 2022. This particular iteration of Earthworks is immersive – both as a recording and a full-body experience, primordial and post-industrial in nature. Davis collected field recordings of raw materials and created a multi-channel sound environment using the materials themselves as speakers, soundboards, and resonators. It is musique concrète as composed through a big box store.
A 40-minute conceptual and musical love child of land art and environmental activism, Earthworks is a unique acousmatic piece in which Davis orchestrates the sonic outcome of common commercial building materials. It is an audio tapestry of drilling, fracking, stirring, slurring, scraping, cracking, popping, and hammering, with the bright thread of one very intimate human voice woven through it – that of actress Sylvia Milo. Milo begins the album by intoning the names of construction materials - objects that are used as instruments and as the varicolored speakers through her voice and all the album’s music were recorded. The text is adapted by Christine Giorgio from instructional videos for DIY home improvement projects.
Instrumental samples were played by Nathan Davis, with additional samples played by fellow International Contemporary Ensemble members, cellist Katinka Kleijn (Tracks 2, 3, 6, 7), percussionist Levy Lorenzo (2, 3, 7), violinist Josh Modney (2, 3, 7), and clarinetist Joshua Rubin (2, 3, 7). Earthworks is Davis’ first solo project with Sono Luminus, previously appearing on the label with International Contemporary Ensemble as a percussionist.
Much of the power of Earthworks derives from what the exhibition artists describe as “collapsing the ancient and the instant.” There are non-material aspects embedded here as well, such as the political context of the work: a response to the industrial plunder of the planet. The experience of listening to these materials speak, hearing their breath and pulses, moves us closer to a relationship of awareness and reciprocity with the Earth, whose body we tear apart in order to achieve shelter or convenience, and whose riches we violently transmute into material for use.
More on Earthworks here.
Earthworks Track Listing
Nathan Davis (b.1973) – Earthworks (2021)
1. Exposition [1:45]
2. Circulation [8:42]
3. Weathering [8:35]
4. Erosion [5:50]
5. Extraction [4:37]
6. Installation [6:47]
7. Regeneration [3:46]
Total Time: 00:40:08
Nathan Davis (composer), instrumental samples
Sylvia Milo, voice
Katinka Kleijn (cello): tracks 2, 3, 6, 7
Levy Lorenzo (percussion): tracks 2, 3, 7
Josh Modney (violin): tracks 2, 3, 7
Joshua Rubin (clarinet): tracks 2, 3, 7
Christine Giorgio, text adaptations
Producers: Nathan Davis & Daniel Shores
Recording, Mixing, & Mastering Engineer: Daniel Shores
Artwork: “Planetary Home Improvement: From Just-in-time to Geological Time” by Gabriel Vergara
Photography: p.5 - Nathan Davis; pp.6/7 - Planetary Home Improvement: From Just-in-time to Geological Time; p.9 - Charlotte Dobre; Illustrations by Gabriel Vergara, mounted to speaker panels designed by Nathan Davis, photographed by Zdenek Porcal (Studio Flusser), used by permission from VI PER Gallery (Prague)
Liner Notes: Peter Catapano
Layout: Joshua Frey
Executive Producer: Collin J. Rae
Recorded January 9-10, 2023 at Sono Luminus Studios, Boyce, VA 22620
About Nathan Davis
Nathan Davis (b. 1973) "writes music that deals deftly and poetically with timbre and sonority" (The New York Times). His opera/ballet Hagoromo was produced by American Opera Projects and premiered at the BAM Next Wave Festival with the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, choreographer David Neumann, and dancers Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto. Lincoln Center presented the premiere of Bells, a site-specific work for ensemble, multi-channel audio, and live broadcast to audience members’ mobile phones.
Nathan has received other commissions from GMEM and Ensemble CBarré (Marseille), FringeArts and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (Philadelphia), Donaueschinger Musiktage (Germany), Yarn/Wire, Claire Chase, Ekmeles, Miller Theatre, Ojai Music Festival, the Calder Quartet, and Third Coast Percussion. He has had premieres at Tanglewood, Park Avenue Armory, Guggenheim Museum, and Carnegie Hall. His music has been released on record labels including Starkland, Tundra, New Focus Recordings, Infrequent Seams, and Bridge Records.
An Aaron Copland Fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation, Davis has received awards and fellowships from the Camargo Foundation, New Music USA, NYSCA, Meet The Composer, Fromm Foundation, Jerome Foundation, American Music Center, MATA, and ASCAP. Davis and Phyllis Chen won an NY Innovative Theater Award for their score to Sylvia Milo's play The Other Mozart, for which Nathan also received a Drama Desk nomination. His current collaboration with Milo, 7 Magdalenes, had a 3-week run at HERE Arts in 2024.
Also an active percussionist and member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Davis appeared as a concerto soloist on hammered dulcimer with the Seattle Symphony, Tokyo Symphony, and Nagoya Philharmonic. Davis holds degrees in composition and in percussion from Rice, Yale, and the Rotterdams Conservatorium on a Fulbright Fellowship. He currently teaches composition and electronic music at The New School. www.nathandavis.com.
About Sylvia Milo
Sylvia Milo is an award-winning theater artist, actress, writer and director, based in New York City, originally from Poland. Milo wrote, starred in, and self-produced her solo play, The Other Mozart, about the forgotten, genius sister of Amadeus Mozart. The play had a critically acclaimed Off-Broadway run at HERE Arts Center, earning Drama Desk and Off Broadway Alliance nominations, and 8 New York Innovative Theatre nominations, including Outstanding Full Length Script. The Other Mozart won two NYIT Awards, including Outstanding Solo Performance by Milo. The play continues on the road with over 300 performances to date, including 30 U.S. states, a run in London at St. James Theatre, in Munich at the Pasinger Fabrik, and in Hong Kong at the Hong Kong Cultural Center. It was presented in Vienna at the Mozarthaus Vienna and in Salzburg at the invitation of the Mozarteum Foundation (inside the Mozarts’ Wohnhaus apartment). The play inspired the creation of an annual symposium on Maria Anna Mozart at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg and was performed as part of its first edition. In 2016, Milo was commissioned by The Guardian to write an article about The Other Mozart and its cultural impact. She and the play are featured in the Mediastockade PBS’ 2024 documentary, “Mozart’s Sister.”
Milo also created the character of Bob Dylan in the OBIE Award-winning The West Village Fragments by Peculiar Works, and as a member of the Bats at the Flea Theater she co-wrote and starred in Seating Arrangements, directed by Eric Pold of Gob Squad. She adapted and directed an all-female version of Hamlet and starred as Ophelia at the Mark Morris Dance Center. In New York, she has performed at La Mama, Ontological-Hysteric, Theatre For the New City, Dixon Place, Cherry Lane, The Ohio Theatre, and at MoMA.
She is a graduate of New York University, with training at the Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg Theatre Institutes, and at The Grotowski Institutes in Poland and Italy. She was a 2018 Fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy and was awarded that year’s Fellowship at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York to develop 7 Magdalenes together with Nathan Davis. www.sylviamilo.com
Illustrations by: Gabriel Vergara
# # #
FEATURED JOBS
RENT A PHOTO
