Vespers For A New Dark Age, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the 2014 Ecstatic Music Festival, is a distorted, wild, blasphemous take on the traditional Vespers prayer service, in which fragments of poems by Matthew Zapruder replace the customary sacred text. Percussionist Glenn Kotche rattles boundaries of the written score with his expansive virtuosity and supernatural energy, and the instrumentalists of the ensemble Victoire, armed with synthesizers, organs, amplified strings and winds, further bridge the sonic gap between the new and the old, the profane and the spiritual. Electronic producer Lorna Dune helped to shape the sound of nearly every moment, electronic and acoustic. She also created a sublime remix of A Thousand Tongues, transforming a work for electronics, cello and voice into something completely unexpected and entrancing.

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REVIEW:

The composer and keyboardist Missy Mazzoli has a thing for unlikely connections and startling gestures, and one of her gifts is the ability to tease out the hidden logic behind her choices. Her ravishing, unsettling album “Vespers for a New Dark Age” unfolds as a meditation on technology and spirituality, alienation and self-interest. Its ominous but propulsive score ranges from the chamber-operatic to the electronic and semiabstract.

– New York Times