Eliza Bagg - Waves & Lines (2019)

Waves & Lines is the new album from New Zealand-born, Princeton-based composer Gemma Peacocke, out November 30 on New Amsterdam Records. The record is available exclusively through New Amsterdam’s Bandcamp subscription as part of the Windmill Series, a new digitally-focused set of releases for subscribers in addition to our existing release schedule. Subscribe today to receive the album, which will be released on all other platforms February 15 2019.

Waves & Lines is a 50-minute multimedia song cycle for soprano, electronics and chamber ensemble. The album is based on a collection of Afghan women’s folk poems called landays. These poems are passed down secretly as a sung oral tradition and were collected and translated by Eliza Griswold in the book I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from contemporary Afghanistan.

Exploring the distance, anonymity and strange intimacy of phone calls, text messages, and radio broadcasts in which the poems are shared, the song cycle features the use of fixed electronics and projections.