Transsonus – Weaving Music

album released digitally April 17th, 2020

Drummer Jessie Cox and pianist Sam Yulsman’s debut album as Transsonus, Weaving Music, documents their original, experimental approach to jazz, classical and electronic music traditions. Recorded and mixed in Columbia University’s Computer Music Center at Prentis Hall, Transsonus’ boundary pushing explorations of instrumental, vocal and electronic techniques weave personal approaches to the discovery of weird, alien sounds, with conceptual dialogues between different modernist impulses of Milton Babbit, Edgar Varese, and other luminary ghosts of Prentis’s now decaying infrastructure. At once rhapsodic, and irreverent, opaque and transparent, the record is defined by a radical openness to the use of contrasting musical colors and structures of feeling, with Cox, Yulsman and their cast of collaborators luxuriating in moments of contradiction, paradox and incommensurability.

“Transsonus is a ritual weaving of the music that binds us to each other, to our pasts, to our-selves. This is not the music of traveling, of pushing against or towards, of selves, of stories about tidy pasts or futures: it’s the music of our new-livity, a music of revelations, where the weaver is the code, the myth, the thought-shadows hovering above what we play, showing what is to come, or what could have been – what was and will come to be heard as sound elsewhere, but can only be noticed and felt here and now as the winding of thread.”