Lung by Little Women

[AUM076]

=Little Women=
Travis Laplante: tenor sax
Darius Jones: alto sax
Andrew Smiley: guitar
Jason Nazary: drums

Lung – the second, and final, album-length composition from Brooklyn’s genre-defying Little Women – is sonic cinema without direct precedent. Collectively composed and refined over the course of 2011/12, the piece is a collaborative work at the purest level. Tone poem evocation, pop group melodicism, all-four-vocal-chords-as-one intonation, and unparalleled shrapnel-sharp/laser-beam-focused shredding are some of the sonic vistas moved through during this astonishing creation. The aim of their music continued to be transcendence, episodically here via brutally precise sonic assault, indelibly ascendant melodies and a quiet imbued with the globally resonant sound of the circulatory system.

While their previous suite, Throat, grabbed listeners by the neck from its first seconds, Lung arises slowly from silence. The visceral qualities of their previous work maintained, the band also became comfortable in places of deep subtlety – the long inhale, and magical moment of pause before the exhale – thereby diving deeper into the inner planes of emotion and spirit. The highly charged emotional center of Lung becomes fully evident only when listened to in its entirety.

The band writes, “The main themes/forms of Lung all have the shape of a downfall of something beautiful. We were working with a Shakespearian form from its conception. The main themes that developed organically throughout the process of creating Lung are: the life and death of humans, the inhale and the exhale, the death of earth (both seasonally and ultimately). These themes exist and are encompassed on both the microcosmic and macrocosmic level, meaning they exist simultaneously inside every sound, every phrase, every section, and the entire piece.”


"Lung is conceptualised around the human breath, treating it as a sound source and organising element. The results are both inventive and moving, striking a remarkably fluid balance between structure and free improvisation." –Stewart Smith, The List




"Lung is a work of ferocious, and collective, discipline, recorded in pristine detail precisely because capturing the sounds of the men making the music is every bit as important as preserving the notes they play. It’s utterly beautiful in the way Sebastião Salgado‘s massive photos of miners and shipbreakers are—it’s a document of men at work, creating something larger than themselves. The only way this could have been improved would have been to release it as a DVD, so we could watch them sweat and gasp and wrestle with sound and the air in the room and their own bodies. This is the most beautiful and emotionally powerful piece of music I’ve heard so far in 2013."
–Philip Freeman, Burning Ambulance


"A monumental exercise in both subtle restraint and skronky fireworks." –Brad Cohan, TimeOut New York

"Rating: 9/10. There is no band quite like Little Women and Lung is an even scarcer achievement." –John Garratt, PopMatters



* Full art & notes included as PDF booklet with Digital Album. 

=Little Women=
Travis Laplante
Darius Jones
Andrew Smiley
Jason Nazary

portrait by
Ben Gerstein