Dina Maccabee – ‘The World is in the Work’ (album stream) (premiere)

In a similar way to how Andrew Bird dealt with building a conceptual world around his Pulaski at Night EP with his violin as its centerpiece, Dina Maccabee is exploring vibrant experimental worlds equipped with her viola.

“This record is at its heart a document of me trying to figure out how to become a one-woman band. I was using what I had: a viola and a laptop,” she says of developing her latest solo album, The World Is in the Work.

The record is coming out on August 25 and is largely set on using the tools at her disposal in writing and production to develop a truly unique musical world to inhabit. In many ways similar to an eight-part movement, Maccabee toys with equal parts technology and viola to produce the avant-garde nature of the LP as it ebbs and flows.

Maccabee continues:

“I wasn’t too interested in using looping to create locked-in beats, but I wanted to explore looping and delay, and any other available processing, to construct interesting textures that would be unpredictable in some way. I’ve really only scratched the surface of what I might be able to do with this approach, but I recorded this record in one day as a way of taking a snapshot of where I’m at with it now. I wanted to make a souvenir for people to take home that was as close to my live set as possible, so if they enjoyed the performance, this record is very close to that.”