Kieran Daly & Sam Weinberg - Live Unison and Unison Continued (AMS-5)
Stern Records is excited to release Live Unison and Unison Continued, the latest collaborative effort from American composer-performers Kieran Daly and Sam Weinberg.
Unison marks the fourth album released by the duo since 2022 with this release documenting the second live recorded performance.
As shown in DEMO (2023) and FOUR IMPROVISATIONS (2024), Unison functions as a first principle for the organization of improvisational behavior, allowing for complex overlapping pattern morphologies to result from this simple textural principle. "Play together in unison but without knowing what each other will play" might be the pithy version of describing this practice to the uninitiated. The improvisational texture is further determined through prior mutual agreement on pitch range, register, and basic rhythmic subdivisions (quarter, half, eighth), though conflicts about their possibly-shifting definitions of intonation, pulse, transposition, etc. may emerge throughout performance. Thus, a strange game of follow the leader; the leader is unexpectedly supplanted at any moment and sometimes neutralized by an eerily coincidental tessellation. The music facilitates coincidence by way of the rigorously awry. It's almost as if Paula and Bridgette Powers played microtonal scales together on clarinet and guitar for forty minutes.
Performed and recorded at the Ear Inn, NYC on September 15th, 2025
Kieran Daly: Guitar
Sam Weinberg: Clarinet
Vinyl: Recorded by Sam Weinberg, Mastered by Jack Callahan
Digital: Recorded and Mastered by Jack Callahan
The track recorded by Sam will not be made available digitally and is only available on the vinyl release. The complete 40-minute performance, recorded in close-miked detail, is only available on the vinyl LP edition of LIVE UNISON AND UNISON CONTINUED.
About the artists:
Kieran Daly is an American composer and guitarist with concentration in experimental monophonic music. His work has been presented by Artists Space, Cafe OTO, Default Den Haag, Issue Project Room, Liverpool Biennial, Museum of Modern Art, Non-Event, Pilar Brussels, Pioneer Works, Pitchfork, Triple Canopy, and Wire Magazine, among others. His prolific recorded output can be found on Hibari, Marginal Frequency, Party Perfect, Tokinogake, Infant Tree, and Madacy Jazz, his central digital & print imprint co-operated with Sam Sfirri since 2014. He has also provided soundtracks to several features and shorts by the Canadian filmmaker Isiah Medina, including 88:88 (2015), Inventing the Future (2020), He Thought He Died (2023), and Gangsterism (2025).
Sam Weinberg is a saxophonist, composer, and improviser from New York City. He has released three records for trio since 2023: two with his long-standing group with Henry Fraser and Jason Nazary (Plays Quarter Notes and Other Notes, and Of Peeling Passage: Live at Sisters), and Implicatures (with Chris Lightcap and Tom Rainey, released by Astral Spirits.) Weinberg has also focused heavily on solo work in the last several years, which has resulted in the albums Academy, My Druthers, Live at the Oche.
He has recently performed with Kieran Daly, Kevin Sun, Thomas Buckner, Nate Wooley, Jonathan Finlayson, Eivind Opsvik, Kayvon Gordon, Erica Dicker, Sara Schoenbeck, Brandon Seabrook, Michael Vatcher, and many others.
1. Unison
2. Unison Continued