“QR” Is The Latest Song from Sam Gendel and Marcella Cytrynowicz’s New Album AUDIOBOOK
October 3, 2023 - By Psychic Hotline
This Friday the prolific LA-based improvisational jazz musician Sam Gendel will release latest album, AUDIOBOOK, an instrumental album created alongside filmmaker+visual artist Marcella Cytrynowicz. Ahead of this Friday, the pair have released one final single, “QR.”
Stream/Watch The New Song Here
AUDIOBOOK consists of 13 alphabetically-named tracks and corresponding illustrations that feel like dispatches from outer space, or unearthed ancient runes. At points melodic and cartoonish and at others glitching and somewhat unnerving, it’s a visual work and instrumental album rooted in a strange in-between, in a shadowy and vivid chasm between terrestrial and otherworldly. A puzzle that doesn’t ask to be completed, but invites you to play.
Gendel has a handful of live dates coming up this Fal lin Europe, including The Barbican in London on 11/14 as part of London Jazz fest. All dates below.
The album will also be available as a virtual reality experience that was created by recycleReality, the New York-based creative technology studio. This will display all 26 art pieces and 13 songs together in an immersive digital space. The digital gallery will be displayed for the first time on live on Psychic Hotline’s Youtube channel this Thursday Oct 5th at 2:00pm ET and the full VR experience will be available this Friday Oct 6th at audiobook.gallery.
Cytrynowicz and Gendel have been consistent collaborators since 2020, with Cytrynowicz providing photography as well as music videos and visuals for Gendel’s work, including for DRM and their AE-30 documentary, as well as the short form video work for the Pino Palladino, Blake Mills, Sam Gendel, Abe Rounds project. Gendel has previously contributed snippet scores to Cytrynowicz’s short-form video work.
In viewing Cytrynowicz’s illustrations, it feels like the originals must have been done on a larger scale – a wall, a room, an entire town, an unknown expanse of land. Is it a map or a language? But the illustrations are on 8.5×11 pieces of paper, each drawn in stretches of 6-8 hours across 3-4 days, on a drawing pad of thick paper favored by manga artists, completely freehand and guided by intuition. She prefers to achieve the sort of smooth perfection look that AI might create, with nothing out of place – even if the place of subject feels unknowable. Gendel composed all of the music in real time next to her, improvising, with the bulk of the sonics coming from a Suzuki Waraku III. It’s an instrument he chose for no real reason other than finding it enjoyable to improvise on.
“It makes it easy to explore,” Gendel says. “In the same way Marcella describes how she draws, I sort of unlock these weird puzzles in my own mind, and sometimes just having one interface to deal with takes that mental pressure off. It has a strange quality sonically, too… I just gravitate toward that.”
AUDIOBOOK is the meeting of something distinctly analog weaving into a soundscape that could be at home in a 90s sci-fi soundtrack, the parallel play of a visual artist and prolific musician, abstract art and sound reaching out to touch.
“It’s the sound of us just individually trusting ourselves, and then aligning the two together and letting them meet, and also trusting in that,” Gendel says. “I don’t think about it that directly, though – this isn’t art inspired by art. I would say this is just a piece showing two people trusting in their subconscious and then trusting in that meeting point, wherever that is. And shepherding it along.”
Sam Gendel 2023 Tour Dates
Nov 11 – Groningen, NL – Rockit Festival 2023
Nov 14 – London, UK – Barbican Centre
Nov 17 – Amsterdam, NL – Paradiso
