Balmorhea

Balmorhea have recorded a second DG album, Pendant World. The album features the band’s founder members Rob Lowe and Michael A. Muller alongside a great line-up of guest artists: violinist/vocalist Aisha Burns, cellist Clarice Jensen, experimental jazz saxophonist Sam Gendel, Joseph Shabason on tenor sax and flute, clarinettist Jonathan Sielaff, percussionist Jason Treuting, and vocalists Steph Jenkins and Lisa Morgenstern. Jonathan Low adds synths and percussion and also produced the album.

Balmorhea’s new album The Wind comprises a dozen tracks inspired variously by meditations on the natural world and its fragility, an ancient tale about a saint who carried the wind to an airless French valley and thoughts of climate activist Greta Thunberg crossing the Atlantic. Balmorhea, pronounced “Bal-more-ray” and named for a small town in western Texas, began life in 2006 when Lowe and Muller met and made music at a summer camp in the remote Texas Hill Country. The group gradually evolved into a larger ensemble and toured extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Following an intense five-year period on the road, Balmorhea’s two founders took advantage of a break from touring to improvise and experiment together once more.

A decade-plus on the road, near-constant musical output, and shifting creative priorities caused the revered Austin duo, comprised of multi-instrumentalists Rob Lowe and Michael Muller, to soberly assess the band's future. What, in the form of Balmorhea, was there left to say? And did they have the energy to say it?

Deutsche Grammophon presents Winter Tales – a new seasonal album featuring music from some of the label’s star composers, who were invited to reimagine the music of Christmas and Chanukah, drawing inspiration from their childhoods and homelands. The album, which is due for release on 21 October, comprises 12 very personal responses to that creative challenge, all of which have something fresh and timely to say about winter’s promise of renewal and light’s power over darkness.