VC Artist SUUVI Featured in Natalie Tenenbaum’s New Music Videos

SUUVI performs on music videos created for Tenenbaum’s new album “Standard Repertoire, Vol. 1”

 

VC Artist SUUVI is featured in new music videos from composer/pianist Natalie Tenenbaum’s latest album on the Platoon label, “Standard Repertoire, Vol. 1.” SUUVI and Tenenbaum also perform as a duo for their genre-defying project and multimedia experience, NXIS.

Both graduates of The Juilliard School, the duo have merged their classical musical backgrounds with innovative electronic sound design, production, and technology to signal a new era in contemporary music.

“I’d always been a fan of Natalie and reached out to her two years ago telling her how much her work inspired me,” SUUVI told The Violin Channel. “During one of our long phone conversations, we realized that our goals were so closely aligned that it made sense to just do it together,” she added.

“For both of us, our classical training has been invaluable to our development and indelible to how we create music today. However, we both always felt that there was more available to us sonically than the palette we were limited to as traditional classical musicians. Both of us love electronic music and wanted to create a soundscape for our acoustic instruments to live in that incorporated synths, samples, and sound design.

 

 

“Natalie produced the tracks but gave me lots of freedom to experiment and improvise on the cello, which meant that she’d send me her beats and I’d create weird sounds over them on my instrument, which she then rearranged into the final versions of the tracks. She also really encouraged me to start singing, which led to me doing the vocals you hear on the record.”

SUUVI is featured in a trilogy of works on “Standard Repertoire, Vol. 1,” including Interlude: III. Breaking Point; Piazzólla Oblivion; and Interlude: IV. Aftermath, which also features American rapper D Smoke.

 

 

Tenenbaum explains that the trilogy “came together very clearly” for her after she first heard SUUVI’s rendition of Oblivion over the arrangement and production Tenenbaum created with producer Abe Nouri.

“When I was programming [this album] I knew I wanted to include some special guests on specific tracks and feature them on both familiar source material and original compositions, in ways that could shed a new light on their unique artistry, vision and craft,” Tenenbaum told us. “When I connected with SUUVI, we immediately bonded over our shared experiences at Juilliard and over our current (& mostly non-classical) sources of inspiration. I knew we would collaborate— not only on this album but also as a separate music project moving forward (NXIS).”

“For the music video [for Interlude: III. Breaking Point], I knew I wanted to feature New York where we both had the very specific experience of working tirelessly towards a career as classical musicians; where we ultimately discovered our own artistic individuality and where we connected and shared our first public performance.”

 

A critically acclaimed composer, pianist, music director, and singer-songwriter, Natalie Tenenbaum has created original piano arrangements for Lang Lang, and worked with Tina Fey and David Byrne for the widely praised Broadway productions Mean Girls and American Utopia. She has also performed at prestigious venues including Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Madison Square Garden, and Berlin Konzerthaus.

A Cuban-Chinese interdisciplinary artist, SUUVI has toured as solo cellist with Hans Zimmer, plus commissioned and debuted works by Paul Leonard-Morgan, Steve Hackman, Dan Tepfer, and Pedro Osuna. She has also been an artist ambassador for The Grammy Music Education Coalition and an artist in residence at The San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s Technology and Applied Composition Department.