Composer & Violinist Austin Wulliman Releases New Album, Escape Rites, on Sono Luminus
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Katy Salomon | Primo Artists | VP, Public Relations
katy@primoartists.com | 212.837.8466
New York, NY (March 19, 2025) – On Friday, May 9, 2025, violinist, composer, and educator Austin Wulliman releases his second album of original music, Escape Rites, performed alongside his fellow musicians of the JACK Quartet on Sono Luminus. Known for melding sounds both familiar and experimental, Wulliman weaves stories into his music with a deep passion for capturing emotional resonance. More on Escape Rites here.
The title track, Escape Rites, receives its European premiere with the JACK Quartet on Thursday, March 20, 2025 at Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, followed by performances at London’s Wigmore Hall on Saturday, March 22, 2025 and Musikkollegium Winterthur, Stadthaus in Switzerland on Saturday, March 29, 2025. In addition, JACK performs Escape Rites’ NYC premiere at a Miller Theatre pop-up concert for Wulliman’s music for string quartet on Tuesday, May 6, 2025.
Wulliman’s Late Edition (2024) captures the feeling of being physically and emotionally immersed in a powerful, overwhelming experience. In his program notes, Wulliman writes, “Pressed between bodies heaving to the pulse. The room inside the drum: each of us within its envelope. Sent elsewhere. Stamped to distant locales but together in this resonating box. My wrists were broken. My mind screwed on tight.”
Inspired by themes of self-discovery and connection with nature, Lost One (2024) depicts the story of a moment of clarity in a tranquil environment, where the boundaries between self and the natural world blur, bringing new discovery to an existential understanding. Wulliman’s notes state, “I wake next to a reflecting pool. An inlet. The water here is cool, shaded by trees that lean in to listen, swaying lightly with the gentle breeze, the hairs on my neck alive. I start my own religion here.”
In Escape Rites (2024), Wulliman constructs intricate sonic totems using a palindromic 25-tone scale, where each note finds its distinct place within a complex web of timbral orchestrations and polyrhythmic relationships. Inspired by Boulez’s friendship with John Cage, the piece consists of six continuous movements that invoke wildly disparate emotions and a sense of regression into nostalgia. Wulliman filters the experimental energy of the postwar moment during which Boulez and Cage made a common cause, plus its aftermath, harnessing their utopian energy through the lens of JACK’s performance practice. As a motto for his new piece – and for the program as a whole – Wulliman cites an aphorism by John Cage: “Activity involving in a single process the many, turning them, even though some seem to be opposites, towards oneness, contributes to a good way of life.”
Live News (2023-2024) takes the material and ideas that formed the basis of Wulliman’s first album, The News From Utopia (2023 – Bright Shiny Things), and reimagines them for performance by live string quartet with electronics. The News From Utopia, “an almost psychedelic experience that celebrates how trippy harmony can be” (Bandcamp Daily), was imagined in the depths of the pandemic and created from home, never conceived to be executed in live performance. However, in this three-movement suite, Wulliman captures this material's structural layering and rhythmic energy in new ways. In SYSTEM NOTES, the voice of the quartet emerges along with the musical material that makes up this world. Each note pulses until it becomes part of a pattern, exploding into a pixelated universe. In como se vive (ii), the music crashes from this digital sugar high down to a muted calm, ruminating in a fog, forming and reforming through harmonic vibrations, gradually revealing the energies that ignite Live News. Full of vitality, but ever tugged downwards, this theme to the newscast from utopia ends with the four voices of the quartet coming together to sing a chant, a sad and soulful chorale of common experience if not purpose.
Inspired by John Cage’s energetic and curious Totem Ancestor for prepared piano from 1942, Wulliman created a new version for string quartet. Cage’s original uses just 11 notes on the piano, prepared with screws, bolts, and more, which reshape the harmonic content of each note. In Wulliman’s adaptation, the pitches are re-imagined and re-tuned to new ratios, while new layers of energetic polyrhythmic conflict are piled on. The result is a bacchanale or maybe a hoedown before the ancestral temple.
Escape Rites Track List
1. Austin Wulliman – The Late Edition (2024) [7:59]
2. Austin Wulliman – Lost One (2024) [10:01]
3. Austin Wulliman – Escape Rites (2024) [22:33]
i. Power Switch
ii. Wa(l)king
iii. Escape Rite
iv. Etude X: a table of contents
v. NOTNA: the crystal
vi. el lago de los valores
4-6. Austin Wulliman – Live News (2023-24)
i. SYSTEM NOTES [6:01]
ii. como se vive (ii) [3:40]
iii. Live News [6:57]
7. John Cage (arr. Austin Wulliman 2024) – Totem Ancestor (1942) [2:10]
Total Time: 59:21
Austin Wulliman (composer, violinist): tracks 1-7
Christopher Otto (violinist): tracks 1-7
John Pickford Richards (viola): tracks 1-7
Jay Campbell (cello): tracks 1-7
Produced by Austin Wulliman and Ryan Streber
Recorded and Edited by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio, December 16, 2024 & January 16, 2025
Mixed by Austin Wulliman
Mastered by Daniel Shores
Artwork by Alex Sopp
Photography by Shervin Lainez (JACK Quartet) and Anneliese Varaldiev (Austin Wulliman)
Liner Notes by Austin Wulliman
Escape Rites was recorded with the support of a grant from the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University.
SLE-70037
UPC: 053479703705
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