Richard, Dawn & Zahn, Spencer Quiet In A World Full Of Noise

Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn share a common collaborative ethos, a genuinesense of musical curiosity, and a cosmopolitan eagerness to escape the conventionsof genre. That shared vision first brought them together on 2022's Pigments_icy andwarm, stripped-down and grand, familiar and otherworldly_and now it has reunitedthem for Quiet in a World Full of Noise.By turns intimate, soul-baring, spectral, and startling, Quiet in a World Full of Noiseblends atmospheric and orchestral soundscapes with mellifluous soul, jazz, andjournalistic vocalizing_driving it all home with stark, confessional lyricism. Thenew album finds Richard at her most raw and exposed. This year, Richard's musicianfather experienced mini strokes while being diagnosed with cancer; and last year,her cousin Cisco was fatally shot seven times in New Orleans. Richard channels theemotional impact of these traumatic experiences of loss into her lyrics and vocalperformances, which are left bare and human here, raw and unprocessed across thealbum. Quiet expands the definitions of what constitutes progressive, avant-gardeR&B by rewriting them altogether.On paper, Richard and Zahn's audacious, impressionistic musical collaborations feellike a surprising match. Richard, a New Orleans-reared visionary, has had an improbablejourney from late 2000s reality television and mainstream pop with girl groupDanity Kane to become one of the most prolific, experimental, and visible indieR&B singer-songwriters of the last decade and a half, with seven solo albums underher belt. Zahn is an East Coast-raised multi-instrumentalist and composer workingat the intersections of jazz, Americana, classical, and ambient pop. His growing solodiscography includes People of the Dawn, Sunday Painter, Pale Horizon, and Statues I & II,as well as the duo's first release, Pigments. "Pigments was one of the best projects I'veever made," Richard says, "and the furthest I've ever been pushed as an artist." Thealbum was a critical hit, haile...