Matana Roberts

On this week’s Modern Notebook with Tyler Kline: Dai Wei’s piece “Honeycomb” is music born out of her own observations of a beehive outside her bedroom window. Stuck inside during the COVID-19 lockdowns, she would watch bees come and go, and later learned how bees passed nectar to one another to form a honeycomb–and this natural process went on to inspire the construction of this piece.

Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the garden… is the latest instalment in composer, improviser, saxophonist, and visual artist Matana Roberts’ visionary project exploring African-American history through ancestry, archive and place. Weaving together elements of jazz, avant-garde composition, folk and spoken word, Roberts tells the story of a woman in their ancestral line, who died following complications from an illegal abortion.

Darkness is a Myth, vibrant and versatile performer-composer Clifton Joseph Guidry III’s first self-released EP explores the human-like qualities of the bassoon’s voice through a range of extended techniques including multiphonics, vocalizations as well as thoughtful additions of field recordings and electronics through experimental yet beautifully lyrical storytelling. This album is a representation of how Clifton sees the world on a spectrum of dark and light.