the shape of a child Kyle Brenn

• 1 Brenn: Still/Exist 05:16
• 2 Brenn: Letters to 05:12
• 3 Brenn: Forgetting 03:01
• 4 Brenn: Shining House 02:00
• 5 Brenn: Constellating 03:26
• 6 Brenn: Constellations 03:10
• 7 Brenn: Other Way Around 07:14
• 8 Brenn: Mother's Song 03:58
• 9 Brenn: Never/Find 05:09
• Total Runtime 38:26

Info for the shape of a child

THE SHAPE OF A CHILD is a sprawling, theatrical exploration of identity and isolation through many styles, from intimate chamber music to aggressive minimalism.

There’s a sense of a curtain rising, and a stage being slowly bathed in light, that permeates Kyle Brenn’s “Still/Exist,” the solo vocal piece that opens his extraordinary debut album the shape of a child. The magic of musical theater, and Brenn’s own grounding in it, emerges right from the start, but it also offers a hint of the multi-directional journey to follow: a vivid, action-packed listening experience where a diversity of genres — classical, experimental pop, electro-acoustic soundscapes and even a taste of chillwave — ebb and flow together around Brenn’s intensely personal lyrics of longing, uncertainty, wonder and redemption.

“All this music comes from an experimental musical play that I built up from childhood fixations and blurred memories,” Brenn explains. “Things like a long car ride with my mom, where we have the best conversations, or snippets of letters I wrote to her from my bedroom as a toddler, bartering to stay up and avoid my fear of sleep — even a string quartet interpolation of her favorite birdcall. Clearly my mom looms large, but to me what looms largest is the restless activity of the music. This is music that refuses to be still while searching for calm seas. There’s a boy who lives there, nestled deep down in the stillness, and this album has become a scrapbook of my journey to meet him.”

During covid lockdowns, Brenn began remote recording sessions for the album with Brooklyn-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Sebastian Zel. “We spent almost a year and a half wrangling the layers, styles, and ideas into a cohesive whole,” he explains. “Gestating projects over long stretches allows the ideas to reveal themselves, like driftwood washing ashore. It’s really my favorite way to work.”

Like Zel, Brenn is a well-versed polymath on a wide range of instruments, but his strength really comes through on the drums; you can hear it in the frenetic energy of “Forgetting,” the jazzy, fusion-esque punches and fills of “Other Way Around,” and most prominently in the infectious, groove-heavy “Constellating,” slated as the album’s stepout single. Throughout the album, there’s also a profoundly moving sense of shared purpose among the featured musicians — among them violinists Todd Reynolds and Yaz Lancaster, cellist Ashley Bathgate and bassist Pat Swoboda, all of whom continue to make their own stellar contributions to New York City’s constantly evolving new music scene.

Kyle Brenn

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