Alarm Will Sound release ‘New Acoustica’
TRACKLIST
“minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix]”
Aphex Twin — arr. Chris P. Thompson
“Black Origami”
Jlin — arr. Chris P. Thompson & Texu Kim
“Faceshopping”
SOPHIE — arr. Alan Pierson, Tim Leopold & Matt Smallcomb
“Family Galaxy”
Tim Exile — arr. Oscar Bettison
“Electron Orbitals”
King Britt & Marcos Balter
“Hanabi (in-ear extended mix)”
Chris P. Thompson — arr. Miles Brown & Chris P. Thompson
“The Intention”
King Britt & Christopher Stark
“Vole Sweeps Up!”
Matt Rogers — arr. Chris P. Thompson
“Back Against The Wall”
Jlin — arr. Igor Santos
“Cabeza”
Lucrecia Dalt
“T69 Collapse”
Aphex Twin — arr. Stefan Freund
New Acoustica is out now, listen to and purchase it here.
Today, Alarm Will Sound — the GRAMMY-winning 20-member chamber ensemble of “bleeding-edge virtuosos” (Pitchfork) which has spent 25 years dismantling boundaries between genres with a singularly modular and experimental ethic — release their new album New Acoustica via Cantaloupe Music. Listen to and purchase New Acoustica here.
A sequel to their landmark 2005 album Acoustica — which translated Aphex Twin’s glitch-heavy electronic masterworks into blistering acoustic arrangements — New Acoustica builds upon its predecessor’s formal ambitions. In taking on compositions by SOPHIE, Jlin, Lucretia Dalt, King Britt, and more, Alarm Will Sound push themselves to recreate electronic music’s bold sound manipulation by exploring the limits of their instruments — unlocking fresh frontiers of musical expression by engaging enthusiastically with some of music’s most radical artists.
They recently shared a glimpse of the album with “Back Against The Wall,” a kinetic and trancelike original work from the composer and footwork artist Jlin. Watch the stark and intense “Back Against The Wall” video here. It followed AWS’s rubber-limbed and clanging chamber music interpretation of hyperpop icon SOPHIE’s “Faceshopping.” Listen to “Faceshopping” here.
Read more about New Acoustica via Dash Lewis’s album bio here.
As Alarm Will Sound’s Gavin Chuck writes in the New Acoustica liner notes:
“Over the last 20+ years, we’ve continued to reimagine how electronic music can inspire deep and rich music made for humans to perform live. As electronic music has developed and changed, so has our work with a new generation of collaborators. This has led to the creation of some of our most artistically stimulating, mind-opening, and limit-pushing music.
And with the enormous amount of change and growth that has happened in electronic music since 2005, now felt like the right moment to harness the work Alarm Will Sound has done with these artists to create this follow-up album, an album not focused on a single artist, but rather one about the breadth and diversity of the field.
In four of its tracks (“Electron Orbitals,” “The Intention,” “Back Against the Wall,” and “Cabeza”), New Acoustica represents something fundamentally different from Acoustica: an even newer model of collaboration in which electronic-music artists create original music expressly for and with Alarm Will Sound. Over years of experimentation, we have developed ways of working that allow artists who typically compose for DAWs and digital workflows to write directly for a live acoustic ensemble—synthesizing two approaches that have historically operated in parallel.
This collaborative process unfolds through an iterative back-and-forth between artists and arrangers, with musicians in the studio shaping the final sound. Together, we have invented unorthodox practices that move beyond conventional classical-music practices that rely primarily on notation. In addition to traditional instruments, helium balloons, styrofoam, bubble wrap, and countless unconventional techniques do not merely imitate electronic sounds, but also realize the artistic visions of collaborators who may have never before written for acoustic forces.
The result is music that could not exist any other way—neither purely electronic nor conventionally acoustic, but something genuinely innovative. New Acoustica is an imaginative, virtuosic, and kaleidoscopic journey through contemporary music-making across digital and acoustic platforms. We hope this album is a testament to what becomes possible when the boundaries between those platforms, and between composer and ensemble, dissolve into a shared creative practice.”
More info at https://newacoustica.com/.
Coming fresh off the group’s 2026 GRAMMY Award win for Best Chamber Music / Small Ensemble Performance (for “Donnacha Dennehy: Land Of Winter”), New Acoustica is the second release (following Lift, released in spring of this year) in AWS 25, a series of album releases and live performances that serve as a yearlong celebration of Alarm Will Sound’s 25th year. AWS 25 serves as both a reflection on the group’s varied, form-breaking work over its quarter-century existence as well as a glimpse into the expansive possibilities for their future.
Since their 2001 debut performing the music of Steve Reich at New York’s Miller Theatre, Alarm Will Sound has treated the concert hall less as a sanctuary and more as a laboratory. Over the past 25 years, they’ve collaborated with Dirty Projectors on The Getty Address; built multimedia explorations of cultural rupture with projects like 1969, reframing Lennon, McCartney, Stockhausen, Ono, Berio, and Bernstein through the lens of political upheaval; and joined Björk onstage at Carnegie Hall to launch her Vulnicura world tour. Along the way, they’ve championed a generation of boundary-pushing composers and artists — from John Luther Adams and Meredith Monk to Jlin, Tyondai Braxton, Eartheater, and Tyshawn Sorey — continually expanding what a chamber ensemble can be.
Alarm Will Sound has moved fluidly between iconic concert halls and experimental spaces — from Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to Brooklyn’s Roulette and the Bang on a Can Marathon — appearing everywhere from Disney Hall and the Walker Art Center to underground festival stages across Europe. International tours have taken them to the Barbican, Holland Festival, and Sacrum Profanum, underscoring their unusual position: equally at home inside classical institutions and at the edges of contemporary culture.
Learn more about Alarm Will Sound’s unique 25-year journey here, and find more info on upcoming Alarm Will Sound performances here.