Louisiana Tech Concert Association will present the debut collaborative album from New Orleans electro-revival dynamo Dawn Richard and multi-instrumentalist, producer, and composer Spencer Zahn.
This event, which will take place at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 5 in Howard Auditorium, is free and open to the public.
For the first time in LTCA history, a full album will be performed live. The album, “Pigments” tells the story of finding oneself through self-expression and community through the lens of New Orleans’ contemporary arts scene. Not strictly neoclassical, jazz, or ambient electronic, the project is one long composition that flows through several “movements” guided by five lead instruments: clarinet, saxophone, guitar, strings and Richard’s stripped-down vocals.
Marking Richard’s first step into the contemporary classical world, “Pigments” reveals a new facet of her talents and provides a fresh introduction to Zahn, whose intimate, sprawling soundscapes play with principles of open space and motion.
After first collaborating on “Cyanotype” (a song that originally appeared on Zahn’s 2018 debut album “People of the Dawn”), the two artists wanted to explore making a full-length project that would depart from the celebratory R&B and dance music that Richard is known for, yet keep in line with her love for the experimental and avant-garde.
The story that emerged from the new songs was of “someone painting with broken brushes,” she said. “I felt like the tools that I and other people like me were dealt weren’t shiny. Yet we still painted these beautiful pictures.
“This album is what it means to be a dreamer and finally reach a place where you’ve decided to love the pigments that you have,” Richard said.
After “Pigments” opens with “Coral,” whose title indicates a solid thorniness, Richard’s voice enters on the second track “Sandstone,” which swells into hopeful fervor as she sings of wanting “to be ‘more than’” and claims her dreams as if they’re reality.
The rest of the project snakes through the hypnotic “Vantablack,” whose lyrics about “losing myself in you” are about learning to love your skin as a Black woman, and then into the melancholic “Cerulean,” on which Richard expresses sadness and rage, as she questions to the world, “Are you hurting/Are you hurting me?”
Finally, the album funnels into the triumphant “Umber,” on which Richard boldly states her desire to make “real change” as she sings, “I’m gon’ climb this mountain/Till I reach the top.” All the lyrics are minimal and bare, allowing the listener to bring their own feelings and stories to the music.
As Richard’s lyrics outline this emotional journey, the rest of the narrative is told by the instruments that ebb and flow around her introspections. Though each instrument has its own theme, they modulate to the key that Dawn is singing in and “provide a new tonal center,” Zahn said.
Like on his 2020 album “Sunday Painter,” his approach to composition is informed by classic ECM productions and the solo work of Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis, but morphs to incorporate the energy of his collaborators.
“I’m not the sole narrator,” Richard said. “The composition is the story, and we’re just living inside its space.”
