The News From Utopia

Music for violins written, recorded and mixed by Austin Wulliman

The News From Utopia is a collection of short fictions which draw on a cast of characters arising from a network of conspiracy theories connecting harmonic and rhythmic layerings to a spectrum of melodic ideas and coloristic instrumentations. The conflicts and contradictions of these characters drive the narrative of each track and the form of the collection as a whole. The listener is taken into a dreamscape of an imaginary sea, shocks awake to a caffeinated urban morning, goes inside the social media algorithm, and experiences a reimagining of Zadie Smith’s story “The Lazy River” among a cadre of other images and scenes.

The News From Utopia came out on September 15, 2023 on Bright Shiny Things and you can buy it here.

My garden of pixels

Sketches for The News From Utopia

Cover art by Haeg Design

The Lazy River

The Fool

The first single BLINK with video by Iván Decoud whose music lessons in Spanish over zoom the summer of 2020 were a crucial positive force for changing how I was thinking and making the record.