HAZMAT MODINE
Cicada
In Stores May 17

Cd Release Concert At Le Poisson Rouge
Saturday May 21st, 7:00pm

 

 

Two years in the making, Hazmat Modine's new album, is a true epic involving four continents,dozens of musicians, and collaborations with The Gangbe Brass Band, Natalie Merchant, and The Kronos Quartet.

 

Hazmat Modine is a band in perpetual motion. In 2006, All Music Guide called the New York-based octet’s debut album, Bahamut, “at once ageless and primeval, authentically indigenous and inexplicably otherworldly, familiar and unlike anything else.” Since then, this remarkable ensemble that specializes in happy collisions of disparate sounds has continued its nonstop evolution, extending their musical reach further than ever before.

To Hazmat Modine, timelessness, innovation and inclusiveness trump the trendy and the ephemeral. The very definition of honest-to-goodness American roots music—but also considerably more global and exotic—Hazmat Modine is visually and aurally captivating, continually explorative, unabashedly experimental and thoroughly engaging. Via multi-hour club and concert sets and countless festival appearances around the world, the band has absorbed and processed all that they’ve encountered, emerging at a destination far from their embarkation point.

Formed in 1998 by Wade Schuman, who writes and sings nearly all of the band’s material and forges their creative direction, Hazmat Modine seamlessly integrates primal, guttural blues, funky, unadulterated old school R&B and myriad sounds from other cultures, absorbed during their constant touring in more than 20 different countries across the world.

Says Schuman, “Hazmat Modine tries to get to the core of what makes American music work, and American music is informed by the immigrant experience. There’s an organic evolution that takes place.”

On May 17, the band will release its sophomore CD, Cicada. Like that ubiquitous insect, the male of which emits a nearly deafening sound by vibrating two ribbed membranes called tymbals, the music created by these eight accomplished and inventive musicians is both at one with its immediate environment and suggestive of mysterious worlds beyond.

A pointer to Hazmat’s methodology can be found in the band’s configuration. Schuman’s guitar, diatonic harmonica and earthy vocals set the tone. A solid battery of horns—tuba, trumpet, flugelhorn, trombone, tenor and baritone saxes, piccolo and duduk—explores the melodic outer limits of Hazmat’s meticulously woven compositions, while guitars and drums lock down a groove and provide sonic spicing.

That these musicians empathize with and enhance Schuman’s vision is a testament to their gifts. Each member of Hazmat Modine is a virtuoso musician, but that virtuosity is never abused. All is performed in service to the song.

That becomes clear on Cicada, an ambitious and sonically stunning statement that serves as the culmination of everything Hazmat Modine has assimilated thus far. Among the album’s 14 tracks are two collaborative efforts with another innovative octet, the electrifying Gangbe Brass Band from Benin, as well as artistic alliances with the genre-bending Kronos Quartet, the sensational Tuvan throat-singing ensemble Huun Huur Tu, and the popular American vocalist Natalie Merchant.

“We are living in one of the golden ages of world music,” says Schuman. “Music is coming from all over, and this is reflected when you play festivals—you have musicians from everywhere: Africa, Asia, all over. The cross-fertilization is natural. It's how musicians see and hear the world. We are in a period in which so many kinds of music have already been influenced by other kinds. Gangbe, for example, has absorbed so much of the Americas in its music: Latin, funk, jazz and, of course, the music from other countries in Africa. But we all relate because we have absorbed a lot of this too. When they play a song and you can hear the music of Dizzy Gillespie. It is as if you are having a conversation, or throwing a ball; we all know the points of reference but they come from our own experiences. It’s all connected, how they feel American music is reflected in how we hear African music and visa versa.”

Four years in the works, Cicada marks the maturity of this fascinating collective, more cohesive and intuitive than ever. As original as Bahamut was, Cicada finds the band performing at a level only suggested on the debut. Augmentation—steel guitar, cimbalom, cello, and found sounds gathered during the band’s travels in Indonesia, Slovenia, Amsterdam, Germany and Schuman’s own Harlem locale—adds richness to the core instrumentation, and the band’s vocal spectrum has widened.

“We are more of a living band now,” says Schuman. “We’re a touring band that has played many long concerts in many places and has developed a singular voice as an ensemble. A band that plays often and tours extensively is a different animal. The first CD was recorded over a long period of time while the band was in varies stages of personnel and creative flux. Now, we have a solid horn section that has been playing together since the last album came out; the power of a real horn section is something that has in some ways transformed the language of the band. And our three-part harmonies are, in a way, like another horn section. So the band is bigger, stronger and has a lot of power in its many unified voices.”

Each song on Cicada is an integral component of the work as a whole. Among the tracks featuring guest artists, one standout is “Child Of a Blind Man,” co-written by the American author Elizabeth Gilbert and featuring Merchant and the Gangbe Brass Band—one of two songs on which they appear. Written on an Indonesian mountain road and constructed over an extended time on four different continents, it’s teeming with visual imagery: “Eyes on a highway, keys beside a bowl, rain on a Monday, bones turned to coal/Leaves in a fishpond, plastic radio, figures on a war bond, fences in a row.” The tune is a true collaboration borne out of a deep kinship.

The title track, “Cicada,” takes off via a spoken word soliloquy before veering onto an improvisational road paved by stop-time surprises and Ethiopian-influenced polyrhythms. The murder ballad “The Tide” turns a corner from uptempo Delta blues to invoke both Sudanese music and the American heartland “Mocking Bird” at first is almost peaceful, a gospelesque harmony and a lone, swampy harp setting up the melody. Progressively it intensifies, the drums raging, the guitar and tuba representing the helplessness of sleeplessness. “2:47” too deals with the racing thoughts of the still after-hours, in this case the culprit not a bird exercising its right to imitate but a wayward lover whose arrival home is long past due.

In addition to the Schuman-penned original compositions, Cicada also features three Hazmatized cover tunes that fit right in thematically, a testament to the band’s panoramic range: Louis Jordan’s menacing blues dirge “Buddy,” Frederick Knight’s 1972 R&B smash “I’ve Been Lonely For So Long,” and Irving Berlin’s “Walking Stick.”

Cicada is a feast of textures, atmospheres, hues and dynamics from an American music group with a planet’s worth of sounds at their fingertips. “I don't hold to any orthodoxy,” says Schuman. “I’m not trying to make music that blends in with any scene; I just want to hear certain sounds. At the same time I do think we are a New York City band, because the eclectic nature of the band and its instrumentation is very New York. New York is one of the only places you can find, say, a great tuba player who can play Latin music or blues or rock, African or whatever—in short, a virtuoso who can sing in many voices. That reflects the city and the essential immigrant and mongrel nature of American culture, the beauty of what it can be to be American.”

Contact: Olivier Conan
info@barbesrecords.com
www.barbesrecords.com