Beo String Quartet announces Heart sleeve Triptych, the debut classical concept album for its in-house label, NeuKraft Records. Founded in 2015, "the Beo Quartet...[has] mastered the delicate and refined art of quartet playing. This is an ensemble whose music making speaks to the heart as well as the mind, and they deserve every opportunity to be heard, appreciated and embraced.” -Richard Danielpour, Grammy-nominated composer
Works by Kyle Sanna (Sequence for Minor White), Kerrith Livengood (This is my Scary Robot Voice), and Felix Mendelssohn (Quartet in a minor) join together in Heart sleeve Triptych for an intensely psychological listening experience. "What holds this album together is that each piece is fueled by powerful experiences from the composers' innermost selves," says cellist Ryan Ash, "but they're from totally different sound worlds. Kyle gives us really warm, smooth and satisfying textures, but Kerrith goes for mysterious, jagged, and unsettling. Felix is very traditional but no less passionate."
NeuKraft Records producer Sean Neukom tailors his engineering approach to maximize the expressive potential of each piece: "With Sequence for Minor White, the question was how do we tell the story of the piece through sound? Kyle is an electric guitarist and has done a lot of work in mainstream styles. He's already given us a bunch of neat-sounding extended techniques, like blowing into the instruments to simulate wind, so it makes sense to use distortion, overdubbing, over-compression, and room/delay effects in the recording. We play with space, direction and dimension too. These things aren't usually found on a classical album."
The works by Kerrith and Felix get a different acoustic treatment. "I'm the engineer and producer for this album, but I'm also a member of the quartet," says Neukom. "This puts me in a unique position where I can work for a NeuKraft Records signature sound that is very close to what I hear when I'm actually performing in the group."
Refusing to be confined by genre, Beo String Quartet appears on concert stages across the nation bringing classical masterpieces, contemporary works, and original progressive rock to its audiences. Highlights from the planned 2020-2021 season included performances of John Adams' Absolute Jest with the Dayton Philharmonic and the premiere of triggerLand, an amplified, rhythmically-charged rock show tackling gun culture in America. Beo String Quartet can be heard on its new show An Inside Look, where Beo pulls back the curtain for viewers on the challenges and rewards of its current and favorite repertoire. Each Heart sleeve Triptych work has its own An Inside Look episode available on YouTube.
