Nation Building // OUT NOW

Nation Building, Popebama’s debut album from Gold Bolus Recordings, is a 40-minute guide to forging your own sound world. Through concept, play, notation, rehearsal, performance, and extensive touring, four original works (two by Erin Rogers, two by Dennis Sullivan) capture the duo’s hallmark performance energy in a refined studio mix. Noisy, experimental, multi-instrument, text-laden, with custom electronics, intricate setups and an unwavering attention to detail, Popebama’s work applies the freshness of experimental sound and free spirit of improvisation to precise execution and formal notation. From their ambitious first ventures in 2016, seasoned composer-performer- improvisers Rogers and Sullivan pooled their collective everythings to uncover new ground in sound and performance.

Known for her work with thingNY, Hypercube, and New Thread Quartet as a saxophonist/improviser and composer, Erin Rogers, applies clever orchestration and lyrical phrasing to junky sound-makers and multitasking instrumentalists in Wormhole (2017) while stepping into a concerto of unconventional saxophone sounds, pushed-and-pulled by an industrial engine of wood, metal, and noise in Light-On-Light (2018).

At home in the percussion/electronics laboratory, Dennis Sullivan explores complex rhythmic and acoustic sound-blending in Shedding Waste (2016), where refined instrumental techniques are tempered by cheap, lo-fi noises at an inconceivable pace. A master solo performer, groundbreaking composer, and founding member of the electro-percussive duo Radical 2, Sullivan piles table-upon-table of instruments, electric and acoustic, connected through endless circuitry in Gamma Chamber (2018), casting the listener into a dark cavern of metallic resonance, with thousands of small sounds bursting to be heard.