Poetic Portraits 2024

Esther Quansah (guitars, vocals) and Becky Foinchas (keys, vocals) met in an elementary school chorus class in the ghostly woodlands of Woodbridge, Virginia. The daughters of African immigrants (Quansah from Cote D’Ivoire and Foinchas from Cameroon), they soaked up influences as far-flung and varied as choral symphonies, African wedding music, and math rock, distilling them through a unique lens. Following the acclaimed release of their debut EP Mommy Issues (2021), the composers return with their debut album Dying, an excavation of the ego in 12/8 time. It’s an audio collage, an amalgam of moods, genres, and hysterics that flips formal songwriting structure on its head. The songwriting duo of Foinchas and Quansah has always had a knack for subverting expectations, and this new release bears witness to staggering growth and deliberate abandon. This album is about the creative risk and reward of maintaining pure vulnerability while creating. It investigates themes of meditation, esotericism, and surrealism in daily life to address existential questions about the innermost self. Woven within the fibers of the music is a deeply spiritual aesthetic that challenges time and sonic reality through a formless usage of surroundings. This trio configuration features a new collaboration with Anna Abondolo on Bass Guitar. A native of California and based in Brooklyn, Anna Abondolo is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans music, movement, art, and theater. A graduate from the New England Conservatory, Anna studied bass performance with a concentration in music technology. Curious about individual experience, her work investigates memory, spatial environments, and their relationship to the body. Anna uses a combination of traditional notation, graphic scores, and text, writing for instrumental ensembles, vocalists, electronics, song, and bodies.