Wilco's Glenn Kotche Announces First Solo Album in Eight Years

BY Alex HudsonPublished Jan 31, 2014

Glenn Kotche mans the drums for Wilco, but he's also released some albums under his own name. His last solo effort came out way back in 2006, and this year he will finally follow it up with Adventureland. It's due out on March 25 through Cantaloupe Music.

A press release notes that Kotche witnessed a performance by Kronos Quartet in 2006 and set out to write a classical-style piece for a string quartet. This eventually morphed into a larger project that an announcement describes as a "kaleidoscopic amusement ride of strings, gamelan, electronics and Kotche's vast arsenal of percussion instruments."

He previously performed the album's seven-part suite Anomaly with Kronos Quartet back in 2007. The album further includes a suite called Triple Fantasy (which splices Kronos Quartet with Chicago sextet eighth blackbird and adds field recordings), a gamelan piece called "The Traveling Turtle" and a five-part piano and percussion piece called "The Haunted."

"I called this Adventureland because besides being something that's fun, it's also kind of weird and mysterious, and at the same time scary and intimidating," Kotche said in a statement. "It's a confluence of new territory that I'm trying to figure out and navigate, and by approaching it as who I am — as a drummer, a percussionist — that's where I do have an original voice, and I do have something to say."

The second movement of "Anomaly" is below. Adventureland is available to pre-order here.

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