Powerhouse music collective Zach Barocas New Freedom Sound released Two Freedoms, a two-song, 12-inch vinyl and digital release, on August 20 via The Cultural Society and Sweet Cheetah Records.
Purchase it here.
New Freedom Sound is a collaborative improvisational music group led by New York-based composer and drummer Zach Barocas. Its core membership includes longstanding members of the DC-area punk communities as well as the classical and jazz communities there and elsewhere. New Freedom works are currently identified in a numbered series of “Freedoms,” each of varying duration and instrumentation. Two Freedoms is comprised of the Fourteenth and Twelfth Freedoms.
Barocas says, “Ours is spiritual music, in the sense of deriving from our individual spirits, our spiritedness, our personal energies. Our musical interests and influences include Sephardic songs, contemporary classical, Latinx music, free jazz, chamber music, Afro-Cuban rhythms, and popular songs. Our understanding is that these elements combine for and emerge equally from our audience and our desired audience: varied heritage, passion, and open-mindedness, a belief that art matters and is capable of creating ecstatic and positive shifts in consciousness. These are the qualities we seek in ourselves and find in each other.”
Two Freedoms extends Barocas’s practice into areas of greater duration and harmonic range, incorporating ideas based in the fields of incantation and repetition, as well as a greater reliance on ensemble shifts and instrumentation. The release follows on the heels of Four Freedoms (2021), Eight Freedoms (2022, Arctic Rodeo Recordings), and Second Freedom (2023).
New Freedom Sound’s core collaborators are as follows:
Zach Barocas is likely best known as the drummer for DC’s Jawbox, where he pioneered a unique and influential drum-forward presence that carried through his subsequent bands, notably The Up On In and BELLS≥. His rhythmic sense and off-kilter grooves are also to be found at the center of his New Freedom Sound compositions, which draw from Salsa, jazz, modern classical, and other areas of musical interest.
Mark Cisneros (Marcos Aurelio Cisneros) is a Washington, DC-based Chicano artist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser whose creative output toggles between the Jazz, punk, experimental, and improvised music worlds. As a saxophonist he studied at the New School in New York City learning from such greats as Ahmed Abdullah, David Schnitter, Joe Chambers, and Tim Price. His current trio with bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Nik Francis called WE WERE HERE BEFORE just released their debut record on Catalytic Sound last year. He also currently plays reeds, percussion, and upright bass with Zach Barocas’s New Freedom Sound, drums in The Make-Up, and guitar in Hammered Hulls, Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds, and Des Demonas.
J. Robbins is a veteran of Washington DC’s fertile post-hardcore independent music scene, who first made his name in the late ’80s playing bass guitar in the final lineup of seminal DC hardcore band Government Issue. Perhaps best known as the founding singer/guitarist of the alternative rock band Jawbox (where he first worked with Zach Barocas), he has carried on as a prolific songwriter and contributor to many other music projects since the ’90s, with collaborators from around the world.
His second solo record, Basilisk,is forthcoming on DC’s storied Dischord Records. He has also built a substantial and influential discography as a record producer and engineer in several subgenres of underground music. Since 2002 he has been based in Baltimore, where he records and mixes a diverse range of artists at his studio, the Magpie Cage. His role on keyboards in New Freedom Sound is a step away from his comfort zone as a post-punk rock guitarist, and toward an embrace of his lifelong interest in 20th century modernist concert music and film score soundscapes.
Gordon Withers is a classically trained cellist who studied with Rhonda Rider of the Lydian String Quartet for both a B.A. and Artist Diploma in Cello Performance. Since then, he has primarily played in rock and experimental ensembles, most recently with the J. Robbins Band and New Freedom Sound, and appears on dozens of recordings of all genres. He also has arranged and recorded several cello tribute albums, including Jawbreaker on Cello (featured in their documentary film Don’t Break Down), and Dark Side of the Moon on cello.
Lenny Young (oboe, English horn, recorders) is a performer, an improvisor, a teacher, and a scholar. He has played in classical and jazz contexts, arranges for ensembles and choirs, and works with students at Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts High School.
Photo by Alex Long
