“Lorraine is the name of a new music prototype. This is a music system that governs the ‘sonic winds’ of breath. There is a stillness in the air and the ghosts of the past commands the space. Memories and shadows of ‘beingness’ adorn the ornamentation of old ruins and blessed relics. Sound castles in the sky – long forgotten experiences have returned with love and humility. Lorraine has come home to birth a renewal and awareness of the other. Lorraine the traveller” - Anthony Braxton Composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton is recognised as one of the seminal figures of the music of the second half of the 20th century and of the beginning of the 21st. Expressing himself through an enormous variety of mediums (from his pioneering solo performances of the late 1960s, to quartets, to large orchestras, to more recent works, such as the multimedia cycle of operas Trillium and the gigantic environmental performances of the Sonic Genome Project), Braxton has opened with his work new conceptual and technical paths in the trans-African and trans-European musical traditions, finding a highly original synthesis between jazz-based improvisation and the complexity of classical-contemporary music.

AngelicA Festival previously hosted Braxton in 2006 with Richard Teitelbaum, in 2007 with Cecil Taylor's Historical Quartet, and in 2018 for the premiere of his duo project with the harpist Jacqueline Kerrod – documented by the cd album Duo (Bologna) 2018 (IDA 039); and this new 4-CD box release (IDA 056) represents a further degree of exceptionality by documenting the entire 2022 European tour (Vilnius, Bologna, Antwerp, Rome) with which Braxton launched his new project for four saxophones. An almost unprecedented lineup for the composer, as among the over 300 recordings under his name featuring the most diverse formations, there seems to be no works for four saxophones, except for one piece (Composition n. 37 with Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett) on the album New York Fall, 1974, and Composition n. 169 (+186+206+214) from the year 2000, in which a sax quartet interacted with a symphonic orchestra.

The distinctive feature of this new project is the addition of electronics: an interactive system in real-time, uniquely developed by Braxton using the SuperCollider platform, which acts almost as a fifth improvising member of the ensemble. Lorraine is the name Braxton coined for the compositional system that governs the first stages of this project still in progress: as he explains in the video-interview available online and on AngelicA website, it is a “new system of poetics”, a “mutable and fantasy space” which represents for the composer “the Aether level” (wind, breath, clouds), as opposed to the “ground” level he explored up to this point with his “Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct”, on which he based much of his music production from the 1980s onwards. Accompanying him in this new phase, we once again find musicians who have been part of his conceptual “music systems” in recent years (Ghost Trance Music, Trillium, Falling River Music, Sonic Genome), in the role of both instrumentalists and/or orchestra conductors: James Fei, Chris Jonas, and Ingrid Laubrock (replaced by André Vida for the Vilnius date only).