Dystopia, by Michael Gordon

Dystopia

by Michael Gordon

supported by

Murphy Adams Dystopia is just how it should be- dark, intense, and moving. This record rules. Favorite track: Dystopia.

Steve Behrends & Tamar Granovsky thumbnail

	/

Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

$10 USD or more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Includes unlimited streaming of Dystopia via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

ships out within 3 days

Purchasable with gift card

$20 USD or more
Subscription

Subscribe now to receive all the new music Cantaloupe Music releases, including 19 back-catalog items, delivered instantly to you via the Bandcamp app for iOS and Android. You’ll also get access to subscriber-only exclusives. Learn more.

Subscribe Now $8 USD/month or more
Full Digital Discography

20

releases

Get all 20 Michael Gordon releases available on Bandcamp and save 20%.

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Campaign Songs, Anonymous Man (Tune-Yards Remix), 8, loved., The Tree Watcher (live, 1981), Anonymous Man, Acquanetta, The Unchanging Sea, and 12 more. , and , .
Excludes subscriber-only releases.

Purchasable with gift card

$132.80 USD or more (20% OFF)

1.	Dystopia 30:56	info
2.	Rewriting Beethoven's 7th Symphony, part 1 05:46	info
3.	Rewriting Beethoven's 7th Symphony, part 2 07:38	info
4.	Rewriting Beethoven's 7th Symphony, part 3 04:20	info
5.	Rewriting Beethoven's 7th Symphony, part 4 03:51	info

about

Combining two of Michael Gordon’s most daring large-scale orchestral works, the long-awaited release of Dystopia documents Gordon’s dream of not only stretching the capabilities of the modern symphony, but in his words, of “exploring the gray areas between harmony and dissonance.” On its own, the music of Dystopia paints a picture of one city’s future — in this case, the city of Los Angeles — that is frenzied, chaotic, dazzling, electric, and ultimately...loud.

Gordon had discovered similar sensibilities in composing Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. “Beethoven’s brutish and loud music has always inspired me,” he explains. “At the time it was written, it was probably the loudest music on the planet.” Using one element from each of the original movements as a starting point, Gordon crafts a post-modern take on the master’s classical forms that managed both to mesmerize and scandalize the audience at Beethovenfest Bonn, who commissioned the work’s premiere in 2006. “I had tread on hallowed ground — no, I was leading the way into the future. Well, all in a day’s work,” he wrote of the crowd’s reaction in a blog post for the New York Times.

Taken together, both works reimagine the 21st-century symphony as equally reverent of the past (if not also a bit irreverent), while envisioning, as an L.A. Times review of the Dystopia premiere put it, “a drunken fugue of the future.”

credits

released February 24, 2015

license

about

Michael Gordon New York, New York

Michael Gordon's music merges subtle rhythmic invention with incredible power embodying, in the words of The New Yorker's Alex Ross, "the fury of punk rock, the nervous brilliance of free jazz and the intransigence of classical modernism."

contact / help

Contact Michael Gordon

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Michael Gordon, you may also like:

Ecstatic Science
by yMusic

supported by 11 fans who also own “Dystopia”

Compositions with somewhat cinematic feelings and good chunk of diversity between them. Bandcamp doesn't allow me set Draft of a High-Rise as my favourite, so I have to go with second best track Gremlin Monroe
go to album
mystery sonatas
by David Lang, Augustin Hadelich

supported by 11 fans who also own “Dystopia”

This is stunning. Everything about it is superb: the composition, the playing, the recording. To hear the violin played with a glass-cutting purity, and to hear the melodies unfurl one not at a time is a sublime experience. This is immaculately crafted music, with a power and control that belies it monophonic delicacy. Easily my top modern classical release of 2018 Michael Mueller
go to album
anatomy theater
by David Lang & Mark Dion

supported by 11 fans who also own “Dystopia”
go to album
hard bop (or how i started hating myself)
by april the cruelest

Barcelona's april the cruelest creates post-genre collages that examine internal self-hatred in response to systemic oppression. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 12, 2022
go to album
disconsolate transceiver
by meant.

Brash experimental electronic compositions from this Tulsa-based musician heavy on serrated sheets of sound that hiss and scald. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 27, 2023
go to album
Lighthouse/\Collider
by Saroon

Stirring psych folk from this Portland artist that centers warm baritone vocals in a cradle of acoustic guitar. Bandcamp New & Notable Nov 27, 2022
go to album
Become Desert
by John Luther Adams & Seattle Symphony

supported by 10 fans who also own “Dystopia”

Yet another wonderful epic post-minimalist work by the master of environmental trandenscentalism. The obvious companion piece to his majestic 'Become Ocean'. polinos
go to album