Jane Sheldon - Flowermuscle CD Preorder

Chamber opera composer and singer Jane Sheldon goes big on flowermuscle, yet every measure is hushed enough to capture a whisper. Using Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, she explores the corners of a sonic space that feels both powerful and delicate, unfolding his words as sound expands in many directions all at once. With a pedigree including shows with John Zorn at the Louvre, Lincoln Center and the Barbican, and having recently completed a run of Sydney Chamber Opera’s wild, new Gilgamesh, Sheldon brings the tools of the avant-garde to explore the lush sensuality of transcendent experience, working in close collaboration with Australian audio whiz Bob Scott. flowermuscle's songs are colourful and diverse, in stark contrast to the super restrained palette of her last album [2022's I am a tree, I am a mouth] which was also led by Rilke’s poems. “I felt with the last one that holding back was the natural response to what he wrote," Sheldon says. "We realized early on with this new album that we didn’t want to play it safe this time and needed to push things. I’m most interested in the felt experience of altered states: I am a tree… lived in the privacy of those experiences, but flowermuscle is much more about their vastness, about the possibility of feeling that you’re in erotic resonance with everything else in nature."