New Amsterdam Records celebrates two dynamic releases from alumni of its Composer’s Lab initiative.
Mobéy Lola Irizarry will play music from their new album Babylon Falls, a record that brings together Irizarry’s myriad musical traditions mixing performance poetry, rooted in the Nuyorican Poets Movement and Blues Poet lineages (“Salsa Poetry”), with elements from Hip-Hop, Reggaeton, Salsa, Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba, Chickasaw Oksola Flute playing, and experimental, electro-acoustic sonic manipulations.
To open the night, Scott Li & Claire Zhang present music from their multimedia album SOLSTICE — an eight movement electro-acoustic work which uses the four seasons as a frame to create a space of veneration, mourning, and release.
Both albums are a part of an exciting ongoing initiative of the Composer’s Lab, an educational and community-building program launched by NewAm in 2017. Over the last nine years, it has included over 160 participants from 13 countries and over 23 states in both its online and in-person activities. While a number of lab alumni have released albums with NewAm before, this initiative is an effort to broaden NewAm’s support for early career artists, addressing the growing need for outlets of representation for debut records in the shrinking infrastructure for independent, vision-centered music.
Mobéy Lola Irizarry (they/them) is a Two Spirit cultural worker in Salsa, Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba, poetry, and transdisciplinary performance. Based in the Bronx, they hail from the Puerto Rican diaspora in Hartford, CT, and are a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. They create within the lineages of decolonial uprisings, collections of tiny mirrors at queer clubs, and the precolonial languages of the drum and the braid. They are a Letras Boricuas ‘26 fellow and played Scarecrow in MOMA’s 2026 presentation of Naufus Ramirez Figueroa’s “Lugar de Consuelo”. Lola is the creative director and conguere for Las Mariquitas, Salsa’s young queer future. Lola is quoted in Rolling Stone saying “I want to abolish patriarchy in Salsa… this is a duty to our lineage.”
Claire Zhang is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and designer based in Brooklyn, NY. They create work that spans language, grief, and ritual. Their sculpture and performance work were recently featured in the group show, The dust exceeded all expectations, 2024, and their Impulse Playground, a digital collection of rocks, prose, and a rock typeface, was recently published in Cursor Mag, Issue 07. Their ongoing writing project SOLSTICE, (2022-) a multimedia performance created in collaboration with Scott Li, was premiered at the Frank Gehry-designed New World Center in Miami.
Scott Li is a violinist, composer, producer, improviser, filmmaker, recording engineer, and electroacoustic sound artist blending the Romantic chamber music tradition with emotive experimental electronic music. Li’s compositions fuse modular synthesis, live processing, fixed media, film, photography, dance, and poetry with elements of classical chamber music to “create a simultaneous understanding of The Beautiful and The Sublime, while exhibiting unparalleled emotional induction.” (The Crossfader, 2019) Half of the recently formed “WARP Duo” with electroacoustic improviser Levi Lu, Li is an explorer of haunting and ethereal sounds entering to wildly different styles, and collaborating with a diverse group of musicians, filmmakers, visual artists, writers, and dancers.
