matana ROBERTS

Celebrated composer, performer, saxophonist, soloist, band leader, educator, activist, and mixed-media artist Matana Roberts returns with a new installment of their acclaimed Coin Coin series.

For over a decade, Coin Coin has been the central artistic project for Roberts, a remarkable exploration of American ancestry and the nature of memory through “sound quilting”: modern composition that draws on a wide range of musical sources and traditions, along with researchdriven historical and genealogical narratives that yield prose and poetry both spoken and sung, field recordings, and graphic scores.

The Quietus declares “when the 12-album cycle is complete, it will be regarded as a singular masterpiece of 21st century sonic and narrative art” and Pitchfork calls it “one of the most provocative ongoing bodies of work by any American musician.”

'In the garden' traverses a vivid stylistic array of thematic overtures, excursions and set pieces, ranging from spacious textural invocations to gorgeously tempered horn-led compositions to driving free jazz and exhilarating throughcomposed bursts of cacophony. With storytelling spoken-word lead vocals by Roberts channeled recurringly throughout, alongside various other deployments of layered and group voices, the album is alternately a meditation and fever dream of narrative potency.

This is some of the most intense and intensive music Roberts has composed and captured to date, richly conceived and deeply felt, restless yet focused, unflinchingly substantive and unique. 'Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the garden...' channels epigenetic trauma and tragedy with teeming complexity and fierce beauty — a eulogy, testimony, and celebration, melding music and language in a stunning polychromatic flow of vernaculars and poetics. A powerful work of subjective commemoration and historical-cultural communion that speaks indelibly to the present moment.