Pioneer Works is excited to present a lineup of ecstatic new music that explores forms of pop, experimentalism and minimalism, featuring Astrid Sonne, Tarta Relena & Jules Reidy.

Astrid Sonne 

Astrid Sonne is a Danish, London based composer and viola player. Throughout her
acclaimed discography, Astrid Sonne has been carefully crafting different moods through electronic and acoustic instrumental endeavors.

On her most recent album “Great Doubt” (January 2024) this skill is refined, now with the distinct addition of the composer’s own vocal in the fore. The tone of each track is unmistakably Sonne’s, structured around contrasts through an impeccable sense of timing. Lyrics on the album are sparse, merely highlighting different scenes or emotional states of being, leaving the music to fill in the blanks. Yet they also form a pattern of ambiguity, consolidated through the album title, searching for answers through looking at how and what you are asking, questions for the world, questions of love.

The viola, a trusted companion since Astrid Sonne’s youth, appears effortlessly throughout the album, fully integrated into the sonic universe; through a pizzicato driven arrangement in the poignant track “Almost” or along with booms and claps in mutated cinematic stabs during “Give my all”, paraphrasing Mariah Carey’s 1997 ballad. Yet the string section also gives way to explorations of woodwinds, counterbalancing the bowed movements with digital brass and airy flutes. Finally, beats and detuned piano are fresh additions to the soundscape, cementing how Sonne’s practice is always evolving into new territories.

Tarta Relena

The project was born in 2016 by two singers who explore a cappella the sounds of the different styles in vocal music. Tarta Relena wants to build a repertoire that goes from traditional music to original songs that are related to the geographical area of ​​the Mediterranean. They do not fear to widen the limits of the sacred and the profane. Experimentation is the core of their identity, and the blend of vocal techniques is their creative engine. In the arrangements, the two very different timbres live together with the synthetic sounds and electronic samples. Always looking for complexity in simplicity and maximum expression with the minimum of elements.

Tarta Relena presents a new album that flirts with the notion of tragic thinking: diverse characters who find themselves facing unstoppable consequences, known and unknown at the same time. A conceptual mix of what fate has ready for us, our thirst for knowledge and the inability to integrate future versions of ourselves. They try to capture in music and lyrics the tension and mystery of what we do not understand, coming from logics that escape our usual ways of existing.

Marta Torrella, voice and electronics
Helena Ros, voice and electronics

Jules Reidy

Jules Reidy makes music for processed and acoustic instruments (mostly guitars). Their recent work can be described as a series of non-traditional song forms which combine unstable harmonic territories, rhythmic elasticity and abstract narrative over stretched and episodic forms. Their recent records include In Real Life (Black Truffle, 2019), Vanish (Editions Mego, 2020) and World in World (Black Truffle, 2022), Their newest solo record Trances is set to be released via Shelter Press in October 2023. Notable performances in the last couple of years include the Tectonics Festival (Athens, Greece), Send/Receive Festival (Winnipeg, Canada), Berlin Jazz Festival (Berlin, Germany) and Angelica Festival (Bologna, Italy). For 2023, Rewire Festival (Den Haag, NL), Stanser Musiktage (Stans, CH) End of the Road Festival (UK), as well as shows at Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg) and Jazz em Agosto Festival (Lisbon, PT) have been confirmed. ‘Properly singular material that fuses Reidy’s immense knowledge of American primitive folk music with microtonal experimentalism and abstract pop vocalizing. Decidedly uncool, and all the better for it – RIYL Bill Nace, Heather Leigh or Teresa Winter.’ – Boomkat, 2022