“attendants” presents the album version of each of three collaborations between choreographer Ayano Elson and composer Matt Evans. The collection introduces the listener to the three works (January, With Women’s Work and A Gardener) in their second form, outside of, and with reverence for, the ephemerality of the live dance performances for which they were originally created. These projects take the raw elements of process, medium and collaboration as their subject, reaching for a single interdisciplinary expression through democratic decision making while questioning the boundaries of collaborative titles, asking: if a choreographed gesture is read as musical notation, is this dance also music? If a sound requires a specific physical gesture, is the music also dance? Can nuanced collaboration dissolve the boundaries between mediums?

With “attendants”, both Elson and Evans are credited as musicians and offer a musical artifact that re-exposes their projects in album form. The result is a collection of creatively rigorous and beautiful works that use shimmering drones, patient psychoacoustic illusions, and discordant percussion swells to peel back layers of performed artifice and bare the expressive subtleties of sound in space and a body at work.

Each of the album's compositions were recorded during live performances and utilize field recordings to nod towards specific spaces that left a lasting residue on their process—rehearsal spaces, venues, and outdoor experiences. These recordings fold into the pacing and intuition of live performances, synthesizing Elson’s glacial physicality, Evans’ textural sound-scapes, and remnants of their process into an anxious, austere, and surrealist sound mass. Ultimately, “three scores for solo dancer” finds the outer reaches of “music for dance” and rests between the ethereal synth tones of Eliane Radigue’s ballet score “Tryptich” and the highly percussive sampling in Ryuichi Sakamoto’s dance score “Esperanto”.

Ayano Elson is an Okinawan–American artist based in New York. Her choreography has been presented by Art Cake, The Chocolate Factory, Gibney Dance, Knockdown Center, Movement Research, and Roulette, among others. She has performed in works by Kim Brandt, Jessica Cook, Milka Djordjevich, Simone Forti, Kyli Kleven, Abigail Levine, and Haegue Yang at Danspace, ISSUE Project Room, MCA Chicago, MoMA, MoMA PS1, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, New York Live Arts, Pioneer Works, Roulette, and the Shed. She has developed her work through artist residencies at ArtCake, Gibney Dance, AUNTS at Mount Tremper Arts, and Movement Research’s Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellowship. Elson is currently an artist-in-residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council at Governors Island and Abrons Arts Center.

Matt Evans is a drummer and producer making acoustic and electronic music about the poetic interconnections between landscapes: internal, external, fictional, and virtual. In “New Topographics” (2020) and “Soft Science” (2022), vintage synth burbles, peculiar percussion skitters, and muddy foraged samples are enmeshed like critters in a sci-fi biome. His approach creates a groovy psychedelic instrumental music that is "hyperreal and phantasmal" (Wire Magazine), "meticulous and expressive." (New York Times), and "a form of chill complexity" (New York Times). Matt has performed solo at acclaimed venues such as the Guggenheim, The Kitchen, 2220 Arts+Archive, and Roulette; held residencies at Antenna Cloud Farm and Pioneer Works; given talks at CalArts, USC, Wesleyan University and Dartmouth College; and released solo records with Whatever’s Clever and Moon Glyph.