Season 2, Episode 5: Behind every summer is a community that keeps Fire Island alive. This episode explores the history of the beloved Pines Pantry through the eyes of its iconic Pantry Girls, alongside the volunteer firefighters of The Pines and Cherry Grove who protect the island from fires, hurricanes, beach erosion, and an uncertain future.
Photos: Scott Li & Claire Zhang Release 'Equinox' Single from SOLSTICE
The electro-acoustic work, commissioned by the New World Symphony Center in Miami, explores themes of veneration, mourning, and release across eight movements.
By: Rachel Stone
New Amsterdam Records has released 'Equinox,' a new single from SOLSTICE, a multimedia musical work created by composer and New Amsterdam Genre-Fluid Composer's Lab alumni Scott Congyu Li (they/them) alongside writer Claire Beini Zhang (they/them) in collaboration with French hornist Eli Pandolfi (he/him), percussionist Matthew Kibort (he/him), and filmmaker Lukas Mackinney (he/they). The single was released on October 27, 2026, and the full album is due November 20, 2026. The album can be pre-ordered at nwam.lnk.to/SOLSTICE.
'Equinox,' named after the Vernal Equinox, is a time for renewed growth, warmth, rejuvenation, and celebration. A kaleidoscopic celebration of life, 'Equinox' releases all that has been previously restrained: the violin re-emerges, this time in its full glory, accompanied by an orchestral bed of synthesizers that grow and grow in intensity, reflecting the memories of a lifetime, and collapsing them in sheer celebration.
About SOLSTICE
Commissioned by the New World Symphony Center in Miami in 2022, SOLSTICE was born from, and anchors itself, in the years-long collaborative project between Scott Li's music and Claire Zhang's writing. SOLSTICE is an eight movement electro-acoustic work which uses the four seasons as a frame to create a space of veneration, mourning, and release. Through the eight emotionally charged movements, Zhang and Li explore the question 'can a performance, a work, an album, be a site of burial?'
The eight movements range from entirely improvisational to tightly fixed and notated. SOLSTICE was written as a modular work, allowing for a different set of performers joining the beginning and ending every time, taking on melodies and providing their own emotional and musical reactions to the text. What is recorded within the album comprises the most representative presentation of the piece yet.
About Scott Congyu Li
Scott Congyu Li is a NYC-based classically trained violinist, composer, producer, improviser, filmmaker, recording engineer, and sound artist blending Romantic classical chamber music tradition with emotive experimental electronic music. Hailed by The Crossfader as 'one of the pioneers of the next generation's classical music,' Li's compositions fuse visceral string playing, modular synthesis, live processing, fixed media, film, photography, dance, and prose with elements of contemporary classical chamber music to 'create a simultaneous understanding of The Beautiful and The Sublime, while exhibiting unparalleled emotional induction.' (The Crossfader, 2019) Half of the newly formed 'Warp Duo' with electroacoustic improviser Levi Lu, Li is an explorer of haunting and ethereal sounds and a collaborator of a diverse group of musicians, filmmakers, visual artists, poets, and dancers, with work ranging from modern pop production to experimental noise music.
About Claire Beini Zhang
Claire Beini Zhang is an artist, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Their practice is SITE SPECIFIC and RITUALISTIC. Their sculpture and performance work has been featured in the group show, The dust exceeded all expectations, 2024, and their Impulse Playground, a digital collection of rocks, prose, and a rock typeface, was recently published in Cursor Mag, Issue 07. Their ongoing writing project SOLSTICE (2022-), a multimedia performance created in collaboration with composer Scott Li, was premiered at the New World Center in Miami. In their design practice, they work with clients such as MoMA, Wendy's Subway, Nightboat Books, and Greywolf Press among others. They are currently finishing an MFA at Brown University in Cross Disciplinary Literary Arts.
About New Amsterdam
New Amsterdam is a Brooklyn-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit artist's service organization dedicated to supporting new music by composers and performers whose work transcends traditional and outdated genre distinctions. The label's artists have won numerous awards and accolades, including two Grammy Awards, seventeen Grammy nominations, and a Pulitzer Prize. New Amsterdam has also curated and presented more than 500 live concerts of groundbreaking new music. In recent years, the label embarked on a partnership with Nonesuch Record to support contemporary American composers in realizing ambitious creative projects.
New Amsterdam's Genre-fluid Composers Lab is an educational and community-building program launched by NewAm in 2017. Over the last nine years, it has included over 160 participants from 13 countries and over 23 states in both its online and in-person activities. While a number of lab alumni have released albums with NewAm before, this initiative is an effort to broaden NewAm's support for early career artists, addressing the growing need for outlets of representation for debut records in the shrinking infrastructure for independent, vision-centered music.
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