“STEREOPHONIC ”TO RELEASE AN ALBUM FEATURING ORIGINAL CAST

The play's score features original music by Arcade Fire's Will Butler

Get ready to go east of Eden.

Entertainment Weekly can exclusively announce that Stereophonic, which opens tonight on Broadway following its smash Off Broadway run, will release a cast album featuring the show's original songs composed by Will Butler, formerly of Arcade Fire.

The album, which features original cast members Will Brill, Andrew R. Butler, Juliana Canfield, Eli Gelb, Tom Pecinka, Sarah Pidgeon, and Chris Stack, will be available on digital platforms on May 10, with a physical CD release set for June 14.

Written by David Adjmi, the play, which premiered last fall at Playwrights Horizons to critical acclaim, follows a fictional 1970s rock band on the cusp of superstardom as they struggle through recording their new album.

"It's not a musical because the music isn't being used to forward the narrative of the story, and it's all diegetic music," Adjmi previously told EW. "They do sing, but they're not breaking the fourth wall."

Butler and Adjmi have been collaborating on the play since 2014, exchanging snippets of the play and pieces of songs as they built their work together. But because it isn't a musical, we don't get fully-fledged musical numbers or even all of the songs in their entirety. The album will give audiences a chance to hear some of the songs more fully.

Butler describes the 1970s as the height of the recording industry in terms of technological possibility. "It's the peak of the technology, it's the peak of the material culture," he says. "It's been downhill from there. In terms of quality, we're still using microphones and wiring [from then]. The sequence of electrons was established in the seventies."

"This is the era where sound is the composition," he adds. "You're composing in sound, you're composing in electrons etched onto a tape. That's your oil paint. How those electrons come out of the speakers is the composition more than notes on the page."

Related content:

• Stereophonic duo David Adjmi and Will Butler break down writing a behind-the-scenes drama about 1970s rock stars
• Daniel Radcliffe comes unglued singing 'Franklin Shepard Inc.' in Merrily We Roll Along
• Lempicka review: The artist’s life is painted with broad and messy brush strokes in new musical

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.

2024-04-19T13:08:43Z dg43tfdfdgfd