Du.0 – Thoughts from the Future EPK
released on CD and digital, May 10th, 2024
Thoughts from the Future is the debut album from violin duo Du.0 (pronounced du-point-oh), the incisive musical collaboration between Charlotte Munn-Wood and Aimée Niemann. The album showcases the ensemble’s unorthodox virtuosity and penchant for non-traditional sounds, particularly for an instrument as steeped in tradition as the violin.
In 2016 during a series of jam sessions, Munn-Wood and Niemann discovered they really liked making unconventional sounds together. After scouring the existing repertoire for pieces composed for two violins, they discovered that there were very few large-scale works for violin duo, and fewer still experimental works that suit their tastes and talents. In 2019, Du.0 decided to change that for themselves and for the world with a crowdfunded commissioning project, approaching composers Leah Asher and Scott Wollschleger to write substantial experimental works for the duo.
Thoughts from the Future is a studio version of a concert Du.0 gave in late February 2020. The commissions by Asher and Wollschleger were programmed alongside a preexisting commission from composer Emily Praetorius. These three works center on Munn-Wood and Niemann’s prodigious violin skills, and they notably utilize their singing voices and improvisatory skills as well to conjure worlds of beautiful noise.
Album opener “That It Was to Say” by Emily Praetorius opens with a gently thrumming unison pitch, sustained by both voices and violins. The cloudy edge of sound strains to clarify itself, instead falling into deep, sleepy “breathing” in violins and voices. A distorted chorale emerges before the music returns to soft circular bowing along the length of the violins’ strings.
Leah Asher’s “Upon the Wheel” begins strikingly with a garish display of chittering strings. Du.0 sprinkle noisy violin outbursts with stray vocal syllables before relaxing into sections of garbled, fuzzed-out repose. After a vaudevillian display of swooping slides and wild vibrato, the music crystallizes, chorale-like, before dying away.
In “Dead Horse Bay…thoughts from the future…”, Scott Wollschleger summons the ghosts of discarded objects. The piece is named for the Brooklyn inlet that houses decades of refuse, and accordingly it evokes rusty playground equipment singing in a cold wind and glass bottles orchestrating themselves into a chorus. Rising from the sea and the junk, the violins collectively build a simple melody, embellished by warbling pitch pipes. In performance, this piece has been paired with a film shot by the composer, created while he gathered musical inspiration in visits to the remote beach.
An evening to celebrate the release of Thoughts From the Future is being held in Ridgewood, Queens on June 22nd at the studio of cover artist Beatrice Modisett. This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant program, a program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature and administered by Flushing Town Hall. Deep in the Midwest, Munn-Wood will perform a solo version of Du.0’s concept piece SOUNDNEST at Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project Re:Sound festival on 5/17. And in Fall 2024, Du.0 will release their co-composition O Most Noble Greenness on cassette with accompanying film by Kevin Sims.
Du.0 is a New York City-based violin duo that specializes in experimental contemporary and noise-based improvised music. Formed in 2015 by Aimée Niemann (they/them) and Charlotte Munn-Wood (she/her), the ensemble “[shines] in moments of deep listening” (I Care If You Listen) and cultivates freedom and innovation in its artistic expression. Whether through improvisation, graphic notation, or use of extra-violinistic sounds and instruments, Du.0 seeks to continue the violin’s legacy into the 21st century by expanding beyond the traditional role and identity of the violinist.