Angel Bat Dawid's The Oracle (IA11 Edition) // OUT NOW on all digital music platforms // LP in stores on September 12th
Angel Bat Dawid
The Oracle (IA11 Edition)
out NOW all digital music platforms
LP in stores September 12th
Angel Bat Dawid’s International Anthem debut The Oracle introduced her multifaceted voice to the world. The response to its modest, initial cassette/digital release in January of 2019 was immediate, and immense. Within a month of its announcement, Dawid was being featured on magazine covers and receiving offers from international festivals; and her subsequent activity marked the beginning of an epic run of creative output (including her critically-lauded 2020 LIVE album with Tha Brothahood, the same year's EP Transition East, 2021's Hush Harbor Mixtape Vol. 1 Doxology, and the sprawling opus Requiem for Jazz, released in 2023) that continues through the present moment (hear: Journey to Nabta Playa, her recently-released collaboration with Naima Nefertari).
The collection of compositions on The Oracle present a deep blend of powerful and emotive songs alongside heavy and free improvisation. In true DIY fashion, with pure presence and a spirit of creative abandon, Dawid recorded and mixed the album using only her cell phone, entirely. "Angel's fieldnote approach affirms that the everyday remains a legitimate site of creative production," says percussionist, collaborator, and IARC labelmate Asher Gamedze in his liner notes for the album's IA11 Edition.
Gamedze – the only other musician to appear on The Oracle besides Dawid, who constructed most of the album's tracks by layering, overdubbing, and arranging lo-fi symphonies of her own voice, wind instruments, percussions, and keyboards – waxes extensively about Dawid's significance in his notes, calling her "a living exemplar and extension of the spacious sonic horizons opened by the likes of the AACM and their refusal of any limitations on their creative vision and the destruction of the demarcation between composer and improviser."
Revisiting The Oracle, it's abundantly clear that it was Dawid’s artistic vision and compositional skill that pushed the scope of her explorations so far. It’s how, despite their sonic contrast, the layered delay-drenched clarinet improvisations of “Black Family” or “Impepho” sit nicely with the unadorned fly-on-the-wall majesty of “London” or the nearly sidelong freedom of “Capetown” (which documents her first-time meeting with Gamedze, at his home in South Africa). The laid-back minor key gospel-folk of Dawid’s vocal tunes tie The Oracle together and sit similarly comfortable within the sides of the record.
Gamedze gets to the essence when he writes: "The album's profundity perhaps lies in its everydayness. Its beauty is in the worlds and work which are the music's root. What I do know is that it is a joy that this album exists. An instant classic with anthems ancient to the future. A totally idiosyncratic and grounded orientation to technology and production. A refusal of the lines between composition and improvisation. A multi-layered collage of history, struggle, organising and travel, both physical and metaphysical."
The Oracle Hips us to the Real Work
IA11 Liner Notes by Asher Gamedze
The IA11 vinyl LP Edition of The Oracle comes with a new 8-page insert booklet featuring unpublished photos and new liner notes by drummer, composer, and IARC recording artist Asher Gamedze.
Along with today's digital release of the IA11 Edition, we've published Gamedze's notes on our website. An excerpt below:
Angel works in collaboration with organisations like Music Moves Chicago, institutions like Old Town School of Folk Music, and bandmates and friends to develop and teach music education courses for Chicago's South Side youth. These programmes take place in community centres, in the street, local schools and juvenile detention centres - wherever the youth are at. Always in these programmes these youth are participants - they are encouraged to compose, experiment and, ultimately, are given the space to find themselves in this music. This expansive approach to arts education - encompassing spiritual practice, history, dancing, music theories and more - allows for travel - to other times and spaces through different rhythms and scales.
Like this portal-opening education, and because The Oracle's root is this work, it takes us beyond itself. It refuses the confines of "the album" and moves toward opening a broader world, of Burroughs, of ancestors, of community work, of memory and the work of those who have passed on. Because the album is not just the album, the question of what to write still looms large and it takes us, again, beyond itself to the real work.
Deluxe Vinyl Package
The IA11 vinyl LP edition of The Oracle comes on classic black 140-gram vinyl inside a heavyweight reverse-board jacket, with an 8-page 11x11" insert booklet (new for IA11, with unpublished photos and new liner notes by drummer Asher Gamedze), IARC 2025 obi strip and printed poly-lined printed innersleeve.
*About*
IA11 Editions
Over the course of 2025 we are revisiting some of the most celebrated entries in our decade of releases with a series of *IA11 Edition* vinyl LPs. These revamped LP packages are all presented with new liner notes, new insert booklets, and the fresh 2025 redesign of our obi strip and dome logo. They are also set at a price point intended to make the albums more accessible than ever before.
The first three IA11 Edition LPs
(purchase as a bundle here)
were released on March 28th:
IARC0001LP11 Rob Mazurek - Alternate Moon Cycles (IA11 Edition)
order here
IARC0003LP11 Makaya McCraven - In The Moment (IA11 Edition)
order here
IARC0017LP11 Ben LaMar Gay - Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun (IA11 Edition)
order here
The second three IA11 Edition LPs
(purchase as a bundlehere)
were released on June 27th:
IARC0009LP11 Jeff Parker - The New Breed (IA11 Edition)
order here
IARC0014LP11 Irreversible Entanglements - Irreversible Entanglements(IA11 Edition)
order here
IARC0033LP11 Carlos Niño & Miguel Atwood-Ferguson - Chicago Waves (IA11 Edition)
order here
Another two IA11 edition LPs
(purchase as a bundlehere)
will be released on September 12th
IMRC0023LP11 Angel Bat Dawid - The Oracle(IA11 Edition)
order here
IARC0053LP11 Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer -Recordings from the Åland Islands (IA11 Edition)
order here
...about IA11...
On December 2nd, 2024, we marked the ten-year anniversary of our first release. With a full decade under our belt – ten years of commitment to a growing community of artists, and our original mission statement ("to vitalize demand for boundary defying music," among other things) – we've spent a lot of time thinking about how we'd like to celebrate this milestone. What we keep coming back to is: desire to use this opportunity to revisit and revivify music and memories from our first decade; but keeping true to our ethos of always looking forward, all the way.
In that spirit, across 2025, we'll be rolling out a series of releases and events under the #IA11 banner. Celebrating our eleventh year. Doing our best to retell essential, foundational stories from our past, while keeping our hearts and minds fixed on the present. Trying to establish new standards that can help carry our mission through another decade of work – and hopefully more.
We created an emblem for IA11 with a vibrating interpretation of a chrysanthemum as the central symbol. Aside from just loving the delicious golden nectar that comes from the leaves of this flower, for us, the image of the chrysanthemum resonates as a symbol of longevity and rejuvenation. Two of the driving intentions behind this IA11 effort.
Please stay tuned for more announcements about more special IA11 events and releases across 2025.
Visit the IA11 homepage.
11 of 11 @ Hungry Brain
Chicago
As part of the #IA11 celebration, we have been proud to present this special event series in Chicago, focusing on a different album from our catalog on the last Monday of every month across 2025 at the Hungry Brain. Each 11 of 11 event features deep listening of an album, followed by a small group of musicians performing an interpretation of that album.
The next edtiion, Monday August 25th, will feature a full listening of Angel Bat Dawid's debut album The Oracle (originally released January 2019), followed by a performance by 9magicforever1 (looper, TR-8S, minilogue, sax, flute, and guitar) as he responds to and reinterprets the music of the album.
