ATRIA, VICENTE - Orlando Furioso

"Early European composers felt that their work reflected in its structure the divine nature of the material world. Via tuning, form, and contrapuntal alchemy, these musicians sought to illuminate and edify the complex and perfect order of existence. The music recorded here also reflects the contours of an ordered world, but it is no place any of us has ever visited. By assembling far-flung building blocks from the detritus of a 21st century musical vocabulary, Orlando Furioso brings the listener into a bizarre new cosmos. The result is deeply expressive music that speaks not with the voice of a narrator or memoirist, but with that of a cartographer. Like a science-fiction Dante, the listener is taken on a tour of many diverse and colorful provinces of an alien world. Though each composition references its own set of real-world musical locales (from the Andes to Indonesia to Italy to New Orleans), they are bound by stylistic consistency into a coherent, continuous geography. Permeating this world is an uncompromising commitment to microtonal harmony, rhythmic intensity, and an ability to deploy the esoteric (Nicola Vicentino's notorious 31-tone temperament) and the head-smackingly obvious (a surprise djent breakdown) with equal conviction. Though Atria Vicente's compositions are steering the ship, serious recognition is due to all the players on the record for their ability to meet these demands. Our omnivorous musical diets offer real abundance. They enrich our craft by providing access to limitless approaches from which to choose -- more masters to study, traditions to absorb, and techniques to hone than is possible in multiple lifetimes. They can also inflict heavy and often contradictory burdens of influence . . . When completed with precision and with no stone left unturned, the seams between the pieces vanish and the listener is deposited somewhere beautiful and strange, left to assign their sensations meanings of their own." --Mat Muntz

Orlando Furioso is led by Atria Vicente and features David Acevedo, David Leon, Andrew Boudreau, Alec Goldfarb, Daniel Hass, Simón Willson, and Niña Tormenta. Orlando Furioso celebrated its release at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, NY, as a part of Wet Ink Ensemble's 24th Season opening concert, a performance lauded by The New York Times. Winner of the Deutscher Jazz Preis: Best International Debut Album 2023.

"Making liberal use of microtonal harmony and hypnotic, ostinato rhythms - as well as the occasional stylistic smash-cut, reminiscent of John Zorn - Orlando Furioso announced itself on Wednesday as a punchy, creative force on the New York scene. (...) Atria's rhythms had a welcoming, social propulsion, and the microtonality of his writing for keyboard proposed an individual - even insular - language." --Seth Colter Walls, The New York Times.