Cello on The Good Ones (Rwanda); Two Freedoms turns one
The Good Ones
How do you describe the most surreal, transcendent artistic experience you’ve ever had?
In late 2023, I recorded cello for Rwandan folk group The Good Ones’ new album, their fifth with producer Ian Brennan. But this was far from a regular session — Brennan recorded the duo entirely live in a hotel room in DC, while violinist Matvei Sigalov and I improvised our string parts. Most songs were recorded in a single take.
This music is not for everyone, but actually it is. What I mean is that it might feel unfamiliar or like a historical recording at first, but as you give it time and slow down your own senses and judgments, you start to hear its underlying brilliance. First of all, there is nothing like the sound of collaborators who have written songs with each other since childhood. Adrien Kazigira and Janvier Havugimana’s creative instincts are absolutely locked-in with each other. Adding in the lived experience of subsistence life in rural Rwanda, surviving a genocide, they are able to channel something that transcends language and culture — you start to forget that you can’t understand the lyrics. And finally, the similarity and universality of rural music around the world is absolutely uncanny (and thankfully, made it so that we were able to improvise string parts in single takes!)
It had been so long since the recording that I had thought perhaps it would never come out — perhaps the live sessions were unusable or impossible to mix. But the album finally came out last week and sounds better than I’d remembered. You can stream it or buy on Bandcamp (vinyl and CD available).
Two Freedoms Turns One
The most recent release of Zach Barocas’s New Freedom Sound, Two Freedoms, has just turned one year old. If you haven’t picked up the vinyl of it yet, I highly recommend getting it from Bandcamp!
Two Freedoms represents some of the most ambitious, musically experimental, and joyous work I’ve ever been a part of. I’m extremely proud of it and hope more people take the time to listen to it (and listen deeply, if you can!). Music blogger Glenn Griffith (A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed) perfectly sums up how New Freedom Sound operates:
This is big music. I admire the ambition of Barocas as a band leader, and I dig the sense of freedom here to expand composition and form in ways that are not entirely beholden to the expectations of jazz, or ambient, or post-rock, or new classical -- though this has connections to each. The concept of repitition is what fuels the momentum here, almost like a mantra being repeated. The enlightenment comes from a focus on the central idea of each composition, even as multiple instrumentalists add variations of the melody, or boldly put their mark on it as it moves forward. That push-and-pull between the precision of one set of players and the fire of another is what gives this so much focused energy. Even in the space of one piece, a musician who anchored the start may end up the catalyst for change later. That repitition becomes the anchor, the factor which holds this together as the musicians each individually explore their own paths, even while constrained by the structure of the ensemble.
(This may be my favorite passage from any review of any musical project I’ve ever been a part of)
Other New Music Recommendations
Here are some things I’ve been digging:
Deftones — private music — yes, that is a weird 180 from the stuff above, but it’s an excellent and cathartic listen… maybe their best album ever?
Wombo — Danger In Fives — of all places, I discovered this group from a TikTok ad, but it was fortunate — this young post-punk Louisville trio have one of the coolest, musically inventive sounds of any similar group right now.
The video for New Zealand songwriter Mikey Videotape’s new single, “Needle In A Haystack”. Mikey channels Severance with three generations of his family, while performing a song that has perhaps the catchiest part in 7:4 ever written.
Thank you reading, and see you again soon.
GW