Nora Stanley has spent years as the woodwind player and improviser working at the edges of other people’s records. On Glass, out July 31st via Worm Records, she moves to the centre.
The Brooklyn multi-instrumentalist — saxophone, flute, clarinet, synth, guitar and voice — has appeared on albums by Cassandra Jenkins, The New Pornographers and Beth Orton, and has played improvised music alongside Fred Frith, Kenny Wollesen and Peter Apfelbaum. Her 2023 duo album with keyboardist Benny Bock, Distance of the Moon, earned attention from the New York Times. Glass is the first album built around her own songs, co-produced with Nate Mendelsohn (Frankie Cosmos, Dougie Poole).
Lead single Noble Gas arrives with the announcement. It started from a small, specific embarrassment — the moment your phone seems to be listening, then gets it wrong. “Our phones are listening to our conversations, reading our messages, wanting desperately to participate in the drama of human life,” Stanley says. “Noble Gas is about the limits of that intelligence and a funny-in-retrospect yet painful-in-the-moment mistake in the advertising algorithm it fed. Noble Gas is about inertia, instability, and bonds, about the influence a person can have on you, and about regaining equilibrium after your world has been turned upside down.”
The songs take their cue from Canadian poet, translator, essayist and classicist, Anne Carson, with Stanley working the same seam: reflection, separation, the way we catch sight of ourselves in other people.
In Wendy Eisenberg‘s words, who wrote the notes for this release:
“Glass is a record of subtly devastating songs by a cool headed observer; a mirror and a window.”
Glass is out July 31st via Worm Records
Pre-Order: https://wormrecords.bandcamp.com/album/glass