Saxophonist and composer Ingrid Laubrock is at the center of todays Brooklyn avant-garde, and over the past decade has steadily expanded her reach as a composer, devising new ways to inspire, organize, and situate improvised music. Intakt Records has released several of her most impressive compositional works, including two orchestral recordings, Contemporary Chaos Practices (2018) and Dreamt Twice, Twice Dreamt (2020). Monochromes marks a new chapter in her oeuvre, as she has written and designed richly detailed fixed-media works as a starting point for improvisations. In early 2020, just before the pandemic shut down the world, she began to record the sonic materials that would serve as the fixed media in the piece. Laubrock asked a handful of close collaborators to realize her scores, which mix conventional and graphic notation with text instructions. In each of the four sections of the uninterrupted work (or monochromes), seriously kinetic, shape-shifting tape pieces unfurl, giving a set of additional improvisers an often unpredictable sonic provocation, writes Peter Margasak in the liner notes. With Monochromes, Ingrid Laubrock presents an artistic statement that reflects the turbulence of an age gone off the rails. A masterpiece!
