The Wonder Suit: Brooklyn Session (2021)
New album
out now!
About the album
The Wonder Suit: Brooklyn Session is the first album of Wonder Suit improvisations by pianist and composer Eleonor Sandresky.
Designed by Eleonor as a musical instrument, The Wonder Suit is a wireless set of electronic sensors that trigger sound through various kinds of movements. She envisioned The Suit in 2007 and created it in its first iteration in 2009 with the help of engineer Michael Clemow. The Suit fulfills her desire to expand the color and pitch palette for the piano, creating a hybrid instrument, as well as to increase the emotional meaning of her musical compositions.
In its third iteration, The Wonder Suit is a very flexible suit of hardware adaptable to almost any performative scenario. Within a software program, The Suit can control any parameter, such as reverb and granulation, and integrates easily across software platforms.
A lover of poetry, Eleonor was inspired by the poems of Mary Oliver for the five tracks on the album. A dear friend gave her a book of collected Oliver poems and each of these improvisations is a kind of love letter to nature, in all its seeming cruelty and beauty, to her friend Nancy who gifted the book, and to Oliver’s poetry.
Each track is inspired by an individual poem and the titles reflect the poems directly. It is the conjured images rather than the words themselves that inspired Eleonor for these improvisations. For the live concert performances, Eleonor noted a few words from each poem as an inspiration, a memory of the poems and the energy they conjured for her.
These performances were recorded live at the Old Stone House in Brooklyn, New York as a part of the Musical Ecologies series curated by Dan Joseph on March 13, 2014.
Distributed worldwide digitally by Supertrain Records.
Album Details
Track Listing
1. RAIN 1 (6:45)
2. MOTH MUSIC (3:52)
3. GOLDENROD (6:51)
4. THE ENCOUNTER (5:25)
5. RAIN 2 (8:15)
Eleonor performs live with The Wonder Suit in Mexico City, 2015. Photo by Leonardo Heiblum.
“The importance of place, the energy of a place, the immediacy of place as a driver for improvisation is something that I consciously focus on in these performances. One of the most appealing things to me about Mary Oliver’s poetry is that I get a visceral sense of a scene, a moment in nature. How does the energy of Oliver’s poetry interact with the energy of Brooklyn? It is this sense of the thing being there, palpable in that moment that these improvisations attempt to capture. This album is a recording of my interpretation.”