Modney Releases JACK WHITTEN Single from NIGHTHAWKS Album

'Jack Whitten,' the first single from the boldly inventive composer and violinist Modney's upcoming album Nighthawks, is out now via Pyroclastic Records.

The full album, which features Modney with Ingrid Laubrock, Madison Greenstone, Mariel Roberts Musa, Vicky Chow, Luke Stewart and Dan Weiss, will be available February 5, 2027.

The album takes its name from the famed Edward Hopper painting of a diner at night, which has lost none of its captivating mystery more than 80 years after it was created in 1942. One of the key moments in the music's creation arrived when Modney spent several hours engaging with the painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, an experience that left him transformed. It also sparked a connection with a chapter from Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai's novel Seiobo There Below, in which a man travels to Venice to reconnect with a painting that had moved him years earlier and undergoes a kind of spiritual death as a part of his essence remains behind with the artwork.

'That spring day in Chicago I felt as if my consciousness had split,' Modney describes in his liner notes, 'and I experienced a moment of genuine apprehension that part of me had been left behind sitting on the tranquil cool bench in front of the Hopper, and that, like the man [in Seiobo There Below], 'there would never be any exit from this building, not ever.''

That cross-medium connection led Modney to think about others, and so each of the compositions on Nighthawks is named for and dedicated to artists whose work had provided him with 'transcendent, quasi-spiritual aesthetic experiences.' The album's dedicatees make up a group of visionary creators: in addition to Hopper and Krasznahorkai, there are pieces named for visual artists Jack Whitten, Vija Celmins and Julian Charrière, writers Rebecca Solnit and Cormac McCarthy, and architect Zaha Hadid.

'I started to connect the dots between what I responded to in these artworks and how that resonates with the things that move me in music,' he says. 'I've long had an understanding of how music can be a spiritual practice and can take you to places that are not ordinary. Especially in modern mainstream culture, those places are becoming less and less accessible to us with the overwhelming nature of digital media and news. So I really began to seek out visual art, literature and architecture that take you to these places that are essential to our existence as humans and to deriving as much richness and mystery as you can out of life.'

The boldly inventive composer and violinist Modney is no stranger to achieving the transcendent through music, both as a performer and as a listener. From his explorative work with the composer-performer collective Wet Ink Ensemble and the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble through his 2024 album Ascending Primes, which convened a striking ensemble of collaborators from the forefront of contemporary jazz and classical music, Modney has dedicated his career to devising music of challenging beauty and ferocious originality.

In that work he has drawn formative inspiration from some of the most daring and innovative composers and creators across the broad spectrum of musical experimentation. But in the wake of a popular culture that increasingly relegates art to background noise in competition with 'content,' Modney decided to widen his lens, and sharpen his focus, even further. Embarking on a journey of cultural discovery across a range of less familiar media, he emerged with Nighthawks, an album of works dedicated to eight venturesome creative artists, performed by an ensemble wholly consisting of singular modern voices, realizing music that searches tirelessly for the undiscovered.

Modney's second release for Pyroclastic Records, available February 5, 2027, Nighthawks features a stellar ensemble of instrumentalists, bandleaders and composers culled again from the nebulous realms of contemporary classical and jazz, all of whom blur genre boundaries in their own work: Modney on violin and viola, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, clarinetist Madison Greenstone, cellist Mariel Roberts Musa, pianist Vicky Chow, bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Dan Weiss.

The line-up came about as Modney thought deeply about the musicians he most wanted to work with to craft the follow-up to Ascending Primes. 'Everything always starts with sound for me,' the composer explains. 'The genesis of Nighthawks began with thinking about a dream ensemble that I would love to write for. Having everyone in the band be someone that I was excited to work with was my top priority, but there were also certain parameters that I needed to match the compositional sounds in my head.'

Modney describes the Nighthawks ensemble as a cross between a jazz quartet/quintet and a classical Pierrot Lunaire ensemble - standard instrumentations in their respective genres – combined in service of a defiantly non-standard collection of music.

Modney

Modney is a composer, violinist and 2026 Guggenheim Fellow working at the nexus of composition, improvisation and interpretation. A 'new-music luminary' (The New York Times) hailed as 'one of today's most intrepid experimentalists' (Bandcamp Daily), Modney is a foremost interpreter of adventurous contemporary music, and has cultivated a holistic artistic practice as a composer, solo improviser, bandleader, writer and collaborator. A highly detailed relationship to sound production on the violin is foundational to Modney's creative practice, with a particular interest in complex timbres, Just Intonation, and in exploring the perceptual space between improvisation and notation. Modney is the violinist and Executive Director of the composer-performer collective Wet Ink Ensemble, and a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Pyroclastic Records

Pyroclastic Records was founded in 2016. By supporting artists in the dissemination of their work, the label says it empowers emerging and established artists to continue challenging conventional genre-labeling within their fields. Pyroclastic also seeks to galvanize and grow a creative community, providing opportunities, supporting diversity and expanding the audience for noncommercial art. Its albums often feature artwork by prominent visual artists—Ellsworth Kelly, Julian Charriére, Dike Blair, Raymond Pettibon and Gabriel de la Mora among recent examples.

Recent Pyroclastic projects include albums from Trio of Bloom (Craig Taborn, Nels Cline, Marcus Gilmore), Patricia Brennan, Kris Davis, Brandon Seabrook, Simon Hanes, Yvonne Rogers, and Sylvie Courvoisier.

Photo Credit: Ariella Villefranche

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