Sep 24, 2022
make a poet Black by McKinley Dixon from the album For my Mama and Anyone who Look Like Her - Director: Jordan Rodericks
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make a poet Black by McKinley Dixon from the album For my Mama and Anyone who Look Like Her - Director: Jordan Rodericks
Really neat shindig happening tonight at the Hofheimer Building in Scott's Addition. Trey Pollard will be debuting pieces from Antiphone, his soon-to-be-released album of contemporary chamber music (out Friday -- preorder here). They'll be played by a string quartet in collaboration with Classical Revolution RVA, an organization that aims to present classical music in inventive ways "by taking it into local bars, restaurants, cafes, and galleries." Did I mention Matthew E. White will be opening? This promises to be special, y'all. Hope to see you there.
If you're interested in learning more about Antiphone, be sure to check out the interview I did with Pollard for the Auricular. He was incredibly candid and thoughtful throughout our conversation, and I think you get an especially keen sense for the dedication he brings to his work, whether he's composing original pieces like the ones being performed tonight or arranging songs written by others. Here's how Pollard put it when we spoke:
Matt and I talk about it a lot. The craft of what you do is important… It’s about how you go about it — caring about the details, caring about the parts that make up the bigger thing.
While Antiphone certainly represents a moment of cultivation, it's also a window into how Pollard approaches music on a daily basis. In that sense, his story and Spacebomb's are one and the same: When you do things the right way, it shows. And Antiphone is nothing short of an achievement. What a gift it'll be to see these pieces in the live setting.
Get your ticket here, check out my interview with Pollard here, and listen below to a piece from the album entitled "8 Pairs: Fugue VI. Very Slowly."
As Spacebomb unravels what we have in store for SXSW (click for info on FRIEND ISLAND), we thought it appropriate to speak clearly about who we are and introduce you over the next two weeks to the folks that make our world spin. The art that Spacebomb creates has grown legs and is traveling the earth, but those legs have faces and stories that belong to talented people who have spent the last two years making our idea into a reality. I’d like to spotlight these folks by sharing a few words about them myself, and we have also asked them to put together a playlist that represents a piece, albeit a small one, of who they are. Our goal is to push open a window into our world, one that is seen correctly through a kaleidoscope of characters, gifted human beings that one-by-one make up the rubix cube that is Spacebomb.
Trey Pollard
Trey and I have travelled side by side for some time. We grew up in the same place, had the same guitar teacher, went to the same college, studied the same thing, have similar arranging interests yet never worked together until Spacebomb smashed our orbiting planets into each other at full speed. As I was preparing to record Big Inner I asked Trey to do the string arrangements by saying "let's do a combination of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, The Young Mods' Forgotten Story, and Tropicalia." Trey is the only person I know who has the knowledge, the craft, the cleverness, creativity, courage and the work ethic to put that conversation on a piece of staff paper and come out the other side with work that is all his own and completely relevant to the original vision. Trey is a musician’s musician, a gifted purveyor of sound who finds his voice in the Spacebomb choir in a myriad of ways: as Spacebomb’s string arranger and engineer, the guitarist, pianist, and pedal steel player in my band and was the musical director of our mammoth Hopscotch production. The first time I heard about Trey Pollard, my high school guitar teacher, who was Trey’s as well, was bragging to me about him. The first time I saw him he was playing in a Virginia Beach cover band at a bar I was working at and absolutely killing it -- I think we were both 19. It is my good fortune that our paths have only grown closer and what were parallel stories have now intersected, in a most rewarding way, at a small record label called Spacebomb. -- Matthew E. White
Listen to Trey's picks:
Say hello to Trey on Twitter: @pollardtrey
photos by Sara Padgett Heathcott