Nick Dunston Featured in Bandcamp Best Contemporary Classical of 2024

We’re so excited to see Nick Dunston - COLLA VOCE (OOYH 027) featured in Bandcamp’s Best Contemporary Classical Music of 2024. Big thanks to Peter Margasak for this! You can check out the full article HERE.

Over the last few years, Nick Dunston has rapidly blossomed from first-call double bassist for the likes of Tyshawn Sorey and Vijay Iyer into a multi-layered creative force creating music that lays waste to any specific discipline. As strong as his previous work has been, this new juggernaut, which he bills as an “Afro-Surrealist Anti-Opera,” achieves new heights. I’ve never heard anything like it. The Berlin-based Dunston used a commissioning opportunity with JACK Quartet, America’s most adventurous and technically advanced string ensemble, to forge a work built on dualities, colliding composed and improvised music; acoustic and electronic sounds; and instrumental and vocal elements. The sounds played by JACK are insanely visceral, with lacerating scratch notes, un-pitched scrapes, and just intonation harmony. But at times Dunston treats them like readymades, layering them with his own furious bass playing, or dissolving them within an attack laid down by a string, Berlin-based ensemble rooted in jazz. Working closely with producer Weston Olencki, Dunston operates like a master sculptor, using edits and electronic treatments to facilitate mind-melting blends further interwoven with a quartet of daring vocal improvisers from both sides of the Atlantic—Isabel Crespo Pardo, Sofia Jernberg, Cansu Tanrıkulu, and Friede Merz—who toggle between language and pure sound. Dunston is juggling a shit-ton of material here, and it could’ve easily collapsed under its own weight. But instead, he’s created a suite of dazzling extremes and electrifying confrontation that reveals a razor-sharp vision. There’s not nearly enough space in this column to dig into a textual analysis, but nothing about Colla Voce is simple. After a dozen listens I’m still coming to terms with it, but each spin has only made the process more enticing and rewarding.