After 8 years of performing, touring, and experimenting, Buffalo-based new music collective Wooden Cities has released their first album, WORK. Formed in 2011 as a structured improv orchestra, the ensemble has since garnered a reputation for their dynamic performances of both improvised and notated works of new and experimental music from a wide variety of composers.

Their debut album grapples with issues of labor, justice, and workplace democracy, and features pieces by composers associated with Buffalo’s Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The record opens with Cornelius Cardew’s Red Flag Prelude, an elegiac commemoration of the martyrs of the early 20th century labor movement.

The album’s centerpiece is Frederic Rzewski’s The Price of Oil, inspired by a 1980 disaster in which an oil drilling platform in the North Sea capsized, leading to the deaths of 139 people. The quasi-theatrical piece, performed by a dozen musicians playing a battery of homemade percussion instruments, features two speaking characters (the “dealer” and the “worker”), each of whom comment on the tragedy from their own opposing perspectives.

Closing out the record is Julius Eastman’s Stay On It, a fusion of Afro-Carribean dance rhythms and 1970s minimalism which grants ensemble members significant freedom to improvise and to choose when / how the piece will move forward. As a fundamentally multi-cultural and participatory piece, Stay On It potentially offers a glimpse at a more egalitarian, democratic approach to work.

WORK is the first in a trilogy of albums (WORK/PLAY/REST) Wooden Cities will release over the coming years. We are also eagerly anticipating the premiere of the eponymous film about the recording process made by Mani Mehrvarz of the Buffalo Documentary Project.