Tag: New Freedom Sound

New Freedom Sound Video Clips

Here’s two clips of Mark Cisneros and Lenny Young at Magpie Recording Studio. It’s proven difficult to pull the double duty of leading the session and documenting it, but I did manage to grab some photos 1 and these short videos.

We weren’t able to get the whole group together this past weekend as hoped. 2 We did, however, have previous contributions from a couple of us in hand and plenty of talent around. So if we weren’t all together, exactly, at least everyone’s spirit and imagination was accounted for.

  1. more coming soon!↩

  2. Like for so many of us right now, covid and other illnesses were inhibitive.↩

New Freedom Sound 2xLP

New Freedom Sound’s Eight Freedoms (45RPM 2xLP) was released on Friday. It marks the culmination of roughly a full year of work and shepherding and if you bought a copy, thank you and I hope you’re enjoying it.

If you haven’t bought a copy, there’s still a few left, at Dischord or Stickfigure here in the US, or via Arctic Rodeo Recordings in Europe.

Download purchase and streaming is available at Bandcamp, and the album is streaming on all streaming platforms.

Second Freedom (Resuscitative Demo)

While we’re waiting for New Freedom calendars to synchronize for our next full session at Magpie Cage, I’ve been working on some things here in New York. Second Freedom wasn’t ready for everyone when we last met but some new contributions from Gordon brought the current draft to light. Hope you enjoy it.

New Freedom Sound on Bandcamp

On March first of this year, not a note of this music existed. I had much of it in mind one way or another for some time but didn’t know where to start or how to capture it. It came to me, finally, that I could put together a modest but effective studio, sing the primary chords of each piece, record them over basic drum tracks, and send the results to cellist Gordon Withers. Gordon then sent me his cello ideas for each piece, frequently several at a time, which I edited and shaped into skeletal versions of enumerated compositions eventually called “Freedoms.” From there, the sketches were sent to J. Robbins and Mark Cisneros, and we all met at Magpie Cage in Baltimore to record their ideas and improvisations. I finished the pieces back at my studio, sent the files to J. for mixing and Dan Coutant for mastering and that is the story of these recordings.
“But why ‘Freedoms?’ Freedom from what?” one might ask. Freedom from oneself, perhaps, as one is freed when captivated by acts of creation; freedom from the limitations one has habitually and wrongly set for oneself; freedom from the despair and fear of the cascading and escalating crises of the last several years and especially the last couple of years. These freedoms are temporary, of course, and rarely concurrent. But they are at times all we have, and it seems suitable if humble tribute to capture and share some of their spirit in music. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy it.