empyrean atlas
The initial spark for Empyrean Atlas began one fine summer evening at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn, listening to the legendary musician Thomas Mapfumo wind his way through one incredible groove after another, accompanied by a band with one of the greatest feels ever heard. When you experience something that good, it’s hard to not try and respond. Finding similar inspirations in the music of Steve Coleman and Steve Reich, the seed that would become Empyrean Atlas was planted.
Members of Empyrean Atlas have performed and/or recorded with the Philip Glass Ensemble, The National, Bear in Heaven, Steve Reich, Steve Coleman, Bing & Ruth, Briars of North America, Olga Bell, Happy Place, Little Women and many others. Empyrean Atlas has been featured numerous times on WNYC's New Sounds program, including a live performance with John Schaefer and a special podcast on electric guitarist/composers. In July 2015, Wilco named Inner Circle as one of their 17 favorite records of the year.
With generous support from the New York State Council on the Arts, I will be composing a new 35 min piece for a combination ensemble of Empyrean Atlas + Sandbox Percussion. Premiere in 2025 with a recording to follow!
David Crowell - electric guitar & alto saxophone
Andrew Smiley - electric guitar
Will Chapin - electric guitar
Greg Chudzik - bass
Jason Nazary - drums
music by David Crowell
Press:
"Depending on the tune, the interwoven triple-guitar gamesmanship of Empyrean Atlas can run in a few different directions: toward the mathy post-punk of Horse Lords or Battles, toward warmly anesthetic ambience (say, Pink Floyd meets Bradford Cox), or toward West African high life. On “Echolocation,” the clangy, lapping repetitions feel most in line with that last influence. The quintet’s movements are coiled and contained, but pulsing with small, ecstatic fibrillations." Giovanni Russonello, New York Times
"Empyrean Atlas offers bright, peppy Afrobeat jump-up...[they] have strayed a long way from their classical chamber-music roots, and are better and bolder for their ventures." Steve Smith, The Log Journal
“As someone who maintains a low-grade obsession with pre-'90s Steve Reich and the early ‘80s lineup of King Crimson, Empyrean Atlas's music is like extracting the best parts of both and distilling them into some kind of new, highly synthesized super-concentrate. Tightly interlocking kaleidoscopic textures composed of chiming guitars make up the bulk of this music, frequently accompanied by drum grooves that skip along with the music's inherent textures in a way that feels elegantly light, airy, and hypnotic. Among the usual polyrhythmic preoccupations that define the band's sound on Poly Rush (especially on tunes like “Echolocation” and the title track), there is also a newer element of ambience and space. The song “Nethermead,” for example, features intermittent background electric guitar calls bathed in reverb pitted against the song's churning steel-string guitar foreground texture. When the drums finally come in and settle on the elusive groove, a chasm of space unfolds between the various layers of the song which is both intoxicating and thrilling. Likewise, the soft, sustained, organ-like drones that appear on the final track, “Murmuring,” provide an additional element of contrasting counterpoint to the previous tracks. It's in this space that the finely tuned, synchronous gears comprising Empyrean Atlas's musical machine become most individually identifiable. This has the effect, in turn, of making the complexity and nuance of their whole that much more remarkable.” Andrew McKenna Lee, Textura
"At eighteen minutes, Poly Rush might seem more EP-length teaser than full-length argument on behalf of Empyrean Atlas, yet what a teaser it is...I can't recall another outfit whose polyrhythms lock quite so tightly together as do Empyrean Atlas's...Brief it might be, but a track like “Echolocation,” for example, is very much capable of inducing an entranced swoon the moment that dazzling interplay appears." Textura
Live Set from the tribeca new music festival, 2023
albums
Poly Rush (2017)
inner circle (2014)
Empyrean Atlas (2013)
Empyrean Atlas live on wnyc’s new sounds