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The Sad Album | Laura Bowler + lovemusic @ Wien Modern

  • Mozart-saal Wiener Konzerthaus 20 Lothringerstraße Wien, Wien, 1030 Austria (map)

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 sees Laura Bowler join lovemusic on stage as part of a series of new long-form pieces commissioned by the collective, in which composer-artists not only collaborate closely with the ensemble to develop new works, but also perform alongside them.

As in much of Bowler’s work, 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.


The Sad Album 

For voice, chamber ensemble, electronics and video  2025
Commissioned by lovemusic

Part 1 
i. Dearly Beloved
ii.. Condolences 
iii. Dearly Beloved Reprise

Part 2 
iv. The Invisible Blanket and Me
v. I am Functionally Dead
vi. I Walk the Dog

Part 3
vii. Mirror. Puzzle. Letters

From €13.50 to €27

Composition, text, voice and keyboard | Laura Bowler
Flute | Emiliano Gavito
Clarinet | Adam Starkie
Violin | Emily Yabe
Cello | Céline Papion
Electric guitar | Christian Lozano Sedano
Percussion | Marin Lambert
Electronics | Finbar Hosie
Stage direction | Sam Redway

Co-production lovemusic, CNCM Césaré and Musica Festival

Commissioned by collective lovemusic with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Project realised with the support of Diaphonique (Franco-British-Irish fund for contemporary music), DRAC Grand Est, Grand Est Regional Council, City of Strasbourg, Caisse des Dépôts sponsorship, Maison de la Musique Contemporaine, Spedidam In partnership with SACEM, Friends of the French Institute in the United Kingdom, British Council, Institut français, Institut français du Royaume-Uni, Centre National de la Musique, Culture Ireland, and the Salabert Foundation.)

lovemusic is recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung Ensemble Prize 2025