The Sad Album is an excavation of the darker, stranger, and more tender aspects of grief. Composer and singer Laura Bowler and the musicians of lovemusic have shared stories, laughed, cried, and raged in an effort to understand – and dismantle – the masks people wear when confronting the loss of someone they love. This new show, premiered at Musica Festival in Strasbourg, offers a journey through the voids left behind, magnified frustrations, and celebrated mundanities, gathered over a year and a day of filling and amplifying grief’s silences and absurdities.
Slipping between the universal and the personal, the raw and the precise, the comic and the tragic, The Sad Album explores a permanently altered reality. Drawing from psychological and neurological research, but also deeply personal testimony from the artists, in this visceral and explosive new work, lovemusic are happy to talk about being sad.
The Sad Album pushes the performers to the limits of physical expression. A torrent of text pours from Bowler, while the musicians perform vertiginous loops. True to lovemusic’s performance style, the artists are physically involved in the performance, creating an hour of choreographed chaos that grapples with the impossibility of defining grief.