LEYA, Marilu Donovan (Eartheater, Aerial East, Julie Byrne) and Adam Markiewicz (PC Worship, The Dreebs), have shared their new track Weight which is lifted from the duo’s forthcoming sophomore LP ‘Flood Dream’ due out March 6th, 2020 via NNA Tapes.
The lead single and album opener, which features experimental pop vocalist/composer GABI, hints at the expanded sound of ‘Flood Dream’ which was written during an extensive touring over four months in the US, Canada & Europe. Listen to Weight via YouTube below.
‘Flood Dream‘ includes a few tracks from their feature-length score of Brooke Candy’s queer pornographic film ‘I Love You’ (made for PornHub’s Visionaries Director’s Club) and follows their debut album, ‘The Fool’.
LEYA will be playing their final show of 2019 at H0L0 in Queens, NY. And in 2020 LEYA will tour extensively including performances at SXSW and a residency at Brooklyn, NY’s Pioneer Works.
With ‘Flood Dream,‘ LEYA subvert the academic and classical connotations of their instruments, instead reframing them in a DIY punk ethos and favoring intuition over pedagogy to inform their creative process.
Preorder: https://song.link/FRRwZh2n74KcV
The duo have a couple upcoming shows in 2020.
Upcoming Shows
March 16-22, 2020 @ SXSW – Austin, TX
July 2020 @ Pioneer Works – Brooklyn, NY
More about LEYA?
Framed within a network of outlying artists whose experiments sketch out far-flung deviations from aboveground movements, the work of New York-based duo LEYA stands out as an anomaly that exemplifies the idiosyncratic impulses of the avant fringe. Harpist/vocalist Marilu Donovan and violinist/vocalist Adam Markiewicz seem from a sidelong perspective to approximate the languages of neo-classical performance and post-minimalist exploration in their austere, meticulously rendered compositions. In truth, the duo’s own self-perception casts their project closer to the axes of noise and punk than conventional refinement.
As formally educated composers acutely aware of the traditions and conventions into which their instruments fit, Donovan and Markiewicz exploit preconceptions and confound expectations by pursuing the most transportive and emotional means of communication with their audience. Just as their peers warp systems of electronics or tropes from the pop and rock traditions, LEYA channel the surface signifiers of orchestral music and 20th century classical composition into deeply personal works that encompass bursts of raw dissonance alongside moments of spectral beauty. The duo’s performances shift the spotlight from the authority figure looming over an ensemble of players to those planted in the corner of a dimly lit basement populated with freaks who can’t help but fall into silence when confronted with the duo’s bewildering stimuli.
In an industry obsessed with precise classification, how do we make sense of the ambiguous shadow LEYA casts over the landscape? The duo reject the tenets of the new music establishment and thrive within a scene of noise transgressors and electronic auteurs. In all of its indulgence and emotional upheaval, their music adapts as easily to the context of arthouse pornography as to a late-night bill populated with no wave acts and performance artists, without ever coming off as a harsh juxtaposition. LEYA’s music reveals that the boundaries between these disciplines aren’t boundaries at all — that everything pours from the same well into different vessels that might be carried off in opposite directions, but that will always returned to a shared source.
