For voice, chamber ensemble, electronics and video * Commissioned by lovemusic
Musica Festival – Saturday 20 September 2025, HEAR – Manufacture, Strasbourg
Wien Modern – Sunday 16 November 2025, Mozart-saal Wiener Konzerthaus, Wien
Composition, text, voice and keyboard | Laura Bowler
Flute | Emiliano Gavito
Clarinet | Adam Starkie
Violin | Emily Yabe
Cello | Céline Papion
Electric guitar | Christian Lozano Sedano
Percussion | Marin Lambert
Electronics | Finbar Hosie
Stage direction | Sam Redway
Co-production lovemusic, CNCM Césaré and Musica Festival
This is one of the productions from 2025 that moved me the most. The polar opposite of my projects on silence and listening, The Sad Album by Laura Bowler and the lovemusic collective is an explosive piece: here we shout, stamp our feet, laugh, immerse ourselves in dark thoughts and colourful memories, cry, drink lots of tea and meet up with friends on the sofa to binge-watch Netflix in silence. Ah… finally, look at that silence returning! Come and join us on this emotional journey with collective lovemusic and Laura Bowler.
The Sad Album is an excavation of the darker, stranger, and more tender aspects of grief. Composer and singer Laura Bowler and the musicians of lovemusic have shared stories, laughed, cried, and raged in an effort to understand – and dismantle – the masks people wear when confronting the loss of someone they love. This new show, premiered at Musica Festival in Strasbourg, offers a journey through the voids left behind, magnified frustrations, and celebrated mundanities, gathered over a year and a day of filling and amplifying grief’s silences and absurdities.
Slipping between the universal and the personal, the raw and the precise, the comic and the tragic, The Sad Album explores a permanently altered reality. Drawing from psychological and neurological research, but also deeply personal testimony from the artists, in this visceral and explosive new work lovemusic are happy to talk about being sad.
The Sad Album sees Laura Bowler join lovemusic on stage as part of a series of new long-form pieces commissioned by the collective, in which composer-artists not only collaborate closely with the ensemble to develop new works, but also perform alongside them.
As in much of Bowler’s work, The Sad Album pushes the performers to the limits of physical expression. A torrent of text pours from Bowler, while the musicians perform vertiginous loops. True to lovemusic’s performance style, the artists are physically involved in the performance, creating an hour of choreographed chaos that grapples with the impossibility of defining grief.