On May 26, 2023, cellist and producer Maya Beiser will release InfInIte Bach on her Islandia Music Records label – her first recording of the complete Solo Cello Suites of J.S. Bach. Maya made this album in her converted barn in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, recording the Suites while exploring the varying frequencies and resonances of the room, in order to create layers of sound acoustically. InfInIte Bach will be released digitally in full Dolby Atmos spatial audio, available via Apple Music, and in an immersive binaural mix on all other platforms.
The first single from the album, the Prélude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4 in No. 4 in E-flat Major, is available now. FLAUNT Magazine premiered Maya’s video for the Prélude, stating, “Expansive and ethereal, temporal yet spiritual, shining in shadow, Bach’s music receives a contemporary redux ripe with nuance through its simplicity. Maya Beiser releases her first offering from her latest project, InfInIte Bach, which will release this May. Recorded in a spatial audio and a binaural mix, ‘Chapter 1: LIGHT, Cello Suite No 4 in Eb, Prélude’ encapsulates the ever-changing push and pull of harmonics gliding against sweet resonance.”
Maya writes of the process of making this album: “I spent 2022, my 60th year of life, immersed in recording, and rerecording, deconstructing and decontextualizing, experimenting and exploring sounds, reverberations, harmonics in my converted barn in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, engaging with Bach’s cello Suites. Having dedicated the past 35 years to creating new music, work that reimagines the cello on a vast canvas in multiple disciplines, I radically departed from the conventional classical cello sound. Yet, the Suites were ingrained in my daily practice. Even as I was getting ready to perform a new work by Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen, or David Bowie, I would still begin every day playing a movement from the Suites. Over the years I was experimenting with the process of unlearning the doctrine I was taught about this music, until last year when I took the time to relearn it anew.”
Maya’s approach to this recording was inspired, in part, by Alvin Lucier’s seminal 1969 piece, I am sitting in a room. She writes, “I brought my longtime sound engineer and collaborator, Dave Cook, to the space and we started exploring the acoustic environment. I considered how the space itself uncovers, informs and reshapes my interpretation of the Suites, feeding back the music to me as I play and record it. We mixed many microphones placed at various distances in the resonant space to emphasize nuances in overtones, reflections, and reverberations. Analyzing the multichannel recording, identifying and accentuating the natural drones and harmonics, we further reinforced the resonances and macro harmonic structure of the music. In the spatial audio mix, we aimed to bring the listening experience into the room; guiding the listener through the virtual space as the music infinitely evolves around them.”
Maya Beiser’s InfInIte Bach engages the listener in a profound and all-encompassing way, moving us to reconsider the familiar while keeping whole Bach’s seminal work.
