Lainie Fefferman – White Fire

released September 29th, 2023 on CD and digital formats

White Fire is the debut album from composer/performer Lainie Fefferman. It consists of five sonic portraits of biblical women with an eye towards exploring the emotional resonance they carry beyond their limited descriptions in the original texts.

Lainie began working on the first of these songs in 2016, and they evolved into her first solo performing project. She has relied on her ever-evolving identities as a feminist, a Jew, and an artist to hone these songs into the shape they take on this album. White Fire has allowed her to make music, inspired by both her Jewish tradition and her modern American experiences, that highlights the power and resonance of stories exploring the internal lives of women in ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. The lyrics in these songs were generated by Lainie’s own idiosyncratic answers to the question “how would I think and feel if I were her?” She chose to deploy her own modern palette of processed sounds and samples to illustrate the fully contemporary resonance of these imagined perspectives.

Lainie has been a vital part of not just the NYC New Music scene for over a decade, she is also one of the driving forces behind the New Music Gathering and other efforts to build community amongst contemporary composers and performers around the country and around the globe. She has had work performed by such notables as Sō Percussion, JACK Quartet, and Kathleen Supové, but White Fire represents her first solo album. Lainie has a trove of amazing work from the past two decades that is unreleased, and Gold Bolus will be releasing a second album of hers in 2024 containing portrait pieces she wrote as tributes to her closest musical collaborators.