Dawn Richard, Spencer Zahn – Quiet In A World Full of Noise

Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn share a collaborative ethos, a genuine sense of musical curiosity and a cosmopolitan eagerness to escape the conventions of genre. This shared vision first brought them together in 2022 on Pigments - icy and warm, pared down and grand, familiar and otherworldly - and has now brought them together again for Quiet in a World Full of Noise.

"Quiet in a World Full of Noise" is by turns intimate, soulful, haunting and evocative, combining atmospheric and orchestral soundscapes with gentle soul, jazz and journalistic vocals - and all with a clear, confessional lyricism. On the new album, Richard shows her rawest and most open side. This year, Richard's father, a musician, suffered a mini-stroke while being diagnosed with cancer; and last year, her cousin Cisco was fatally shot seven times in New Orleans. Richard channels the emotional impact of these traumatic experiences of loss in her lyrics and vocal performances, which remain undisguised and human here, raw and unprocessed throughout the album. Quiet expands the definitions of progressive, avant-garde R&B by completely rewriting them. On paper, Richard and Zahn's bold, impressionistic musical collaboration seems like a surprising combination. Richard, a New Orleans-raised visionary, has made an unlikely journey from late-2000s reality television and mainstream pop with girl group Danity Kane to become one of the most prolific, experimental and visible indie R&B singer-songwriters of the last decade and a half, with seven solo albums under her belt. Zahn is an East Coast-raised multi-instrumentalist and composer who works at the intersections of jazz, Americana, classical and ambient pop. His growing solo discography includes People of the Dawn, Sunday Painter, Pale Horizon and Statues I & II, as well as the duo's first release, Pigments. "Pigments was one of the best projects I've ever done," says Richard, "and the one that took me the furthest as an artist."

The album was critically acclaimed as Best New Music by Pitchfork and received praise from Stereogum as Album of the Week, NPR Music, Bandcamp Daily, The Fader, Bitter Southerner and Edition, among many other publications. Production on the follow-up, Quiet in a World Full of Noise, began in New York State in 2023. Fresh off a breakup, Zahn sat down at his piano and dedicated himself to writing and recording instrumental compositions. "I wrote all these mind-expanding pieces on the piano, and they were eerie, spacious piano tracks," he says. He used a piano that was tuned in an unconventional way to the room rather than the normal pitch. These strangely tuned, eerie instrumental recordings were never intended for an album. Six months later, he listened to the recordings again and sent them to Richard, who immediately recognized their potential and said, "Oh, this is the next album."

Richard went into the studio the next day and wrote and recorded melodies and lyrics to Zahn's piano recordings. Zahn brought in talented musicians such as Bryan Senti on strings (violin, viola and cello da spalla) and CJ Camerieri on brass (French horn, flugelhorn and trumpet). In some cases, such as on "Life in Numbers", Zahn used only the original piano recording and scratch vocals, resulting in an intimate close-up of Richard and Zahn.