Carrie Frey – Seaglass: Works for String Quartet

released on CD and digital, October 17th, 2025

Following up on her debut 2023 solo album Seagrass, Gold Bolus Recordings presents Carrie Frey’s Seaglass. Frey has made a name for herself across the U.S. and Europe as one of the leading contemporary and experimental violists of our time. After the widespread success of her first solo album Seagrass (2023) and debut sonata album The Grey Light of Day (2016), Seaglass marks her debut portrait album as a composer, featuring four works of imaginative, alchemical beauty for her string quartet, The Rhythm Method. 

The liner notes for Seaglass, written by Madison Greenstone (of TAK Ensemble), paint an image of the album: “atolls connected by a deeper underlying sensibility that transforms as it continues to experience and metabolize the world.” All four tracks bear the hallmarks of a consistent voice in Frey’s writing for The Rhythm Method, but each develops in new and interesting ways. “A chorus like distant screaming” splits the quartet into shifting duos, culminating in a cathartic group wail; “LATHE” spins the group’s voices into an alien canon; “Gone/Back” melts down and re-forms a memory of a Chopin Étude; and “Seaglass/Pebble” refracts a simple tune, heard at the end, through a multitude of clamoring voices. Drawing the listener’s attention to a sincerity in Frey’s formal openness and her vulnerable expressivity, Greenstone highlights a textual fragment found in the score for “Gone/Back,” “Your travels need not be linear.” This reminder is as much a tender talisman as it is a performance instruction, and invites a listener into Frey’s compositional world of gracefully enigmatic references, lush bubbling soundscapes, and disquieting vocalizations that combine with the string textures to build entirely new sonic worlds. 

Composed by Carrie Frey
Performed by the Rhythm Method: Leah Asher, violin; Marina Kifferstein, violin; Carrie Frey, viola; Meaghan Burke, cello

Produced by Carrie Frey and Bernd Klug
Recording, Editing and Mixing: Bernd Klug
Mastering: Murat Çolak
Recorded at klug.audio January 2025

Cover and booklet photographs by Titilayo Ayangade
Cover and booklet design by Back Pocket Productions

This album was made with support from: The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment in association with The New York Foundation for the Arts.