Albums

Featured Album:

KINDS OF ~NOIS

~Nois presents a post-minimalist and experimental collection of new works by the international composer collective Kinds of Kings.

“Kinds of ~Nois” celebrates six years of collaboration with Shelley Washington, Gemma Peacocke, and Maria Kaoutzani in world premiere recordings of works written specifically for the ensemble. From inspiring melodies, driving grooves, and haunting textures, the musical voices of the Kinds of Kings collective brilliantly highlight some of the best of what this ensemble can do.

Presented in reverse chronological order, the music outlines a journey from light into darkness, beginning in present day back through the pandemic and to the two group’s first collaboration in 2018 with Gemma Peacocke.

Released March 15, 2024 on Bright Shiny Things

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I TELL YOU ME

Annika Socolofsky & ~Nois' record "I Tell You Me" celebrates queer joy and defiance.

“Grotesquely gorgeous” (Chicago Tribune) and “unbearably moving” (Gramophone), Socolofsky’s original 3-song cycle riffs on the old nursery rhyme “sugar, spice, and everything nice, that’s what little girls are made of,” questioning gender roles and rejoicing in the beauty of queer self-expression and empowerment. The album turns this old nursery rhyme on its head, asking “what are little girls made of?” and channels feminist rage and defiance at the double standards placed on women and queers in our society.

In the spirit of individual expression, the song cycle is followed by remixes of each song in the cycle, each created by a different queer artist: Phong Tran, Darian Donovan Thomas, and No Plexus and celebrating their unique voices through their own performances, composing, and production.

Released September 8, 2023 on Carrier Records

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BIRTHDAY PARTY

On Birthday Party, Brooklyn-based composer Cassie Wieland (aka Vines) braids poignant, rich instrumentals with sparing lyrics. It’s a new, deeply personal direction for the composer, whose previous music was primarily written for others to play. Here, her own voice, diffused by the feathery touch of a vocoder, is front and center; her economical words stem from the loneliness you might feel on your birthday, where long gone memories and nostalgia feel their most acute. From these thoughts, Wieland weaves lush, contemplative tapestries, finding catharsis in fuzzed-out melodies.

Birthday Party finds Wieland at her most vulnerable, a feeling that often scared her before she recorded the music. When composing, there was a wall between herself and her work because she wrote her music for others to interpret; with Vines, her feelings are the work itself. It’s an arrival to a new sound and to a new practice of intimacy and honesty in music. And much like a birthday itself, Birthday Party captures all the emotions that come with change, marking the moment when a new chapter begins.

Released August 18, 2023

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Is This ~Nois

Is this ~Nois? We’ve been asking ourselves that same question since we started playing music in 2016. After trying to answer it for a while, we realized that we never really want to find the answer. If you’re doing it right, the answer changes every day. So here it is — the answer we decided to put onto some hard drives over the course of three days in September 2018.

We met in graduate school at Northwestern University, so it made sense that our first album should come from that same special place. Hans, Dave, and Marcos already had wonderful pieces that inspired us and we asked Craig, Niki, and Mathew to write us pieces that would push us into new ways of thinking about the saxophone. So, we leave it in your hands (or, better yet, ears): is this ~Nois?