The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2023 Fall Music Production Grant to GABI for her project Cave of Silence.

This record is about breaking open. It can be both painful and beautiful. It can be funny and dark. The sounds try to build spaces for people to enter into and find their own inner peace or feeling.  This record is a deeply raw space that was created through moments of solitude, loss, explorations in improvisation and finding solace and hope through collaboration.

Gabrielle Herbst is a composer, and vocalist. She’s received commissions from Roulette and the Jerome Foundation, the Nouveau Classical Project, Duo Noir, Experiments in Opera, Fresh Squeezed Opera, The Knights, and contributed to the opera Magdalene as part the Prototype Festival 2020 in NYC. She’s been composer-in-residence at the Watermill Center, Exploring the Metropolis, Inc., Atlantic Center for the Arts, Avaloch Farms, Roulette and Pioneer Works. She has had her compositions presented at venues including National Sawdust, The Stone, Issue Project Room, HERE Arts Center, the National Guitar Society, MATA, and Lincoln Center Atrium.

Under the moniker GABI she released her debut album Sympathy on Software Recording Co. in 2015. Tour highlights with her band included David Byrne’s Meltdown Festival, London, Pop Kultur Festival, Berlin, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam, The Great Escape, Brighton, UK, Marfa Myths Festival, TX, The Wick presented by Pitchfork, and a series at Roulette with Missy Mazzoli curated by Meredith Monk. She released her second GABI album, Empty Me, on Double Double Whammy in 2018 and toured the US opening for the band Mutual Benefit. She was a 2021-2023 fellow with the American Opera Project’s Composers & the Voice program and a 2023 Composition fellow at the Aspen Music Festival. She graduated from Bard College where she studied composition with Joan Tower and Keith Fitch, and the Yale School of Music where she studied with Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Chris Theofanidis, and David Lang.

This ongoing project has been a long process over the course of years in a long distance pandemic collaboration between GABI and Seb Gainsborough. “This is a deeply collaborative record and I feel the transformative production and compositional ideas Seb added to the songs bring a completely new sound to my world. Contributions from my collaborators on bass clarinet, harp and violin weave through the record.”

Songs written and sung by Gabrielle Herbst with production/co-writing by Seb Gainsborough.  

Compositional contributions on harp parts by Marilu Donovan, bass clarinet parts by Mara Mayer, and violin parts by Rakhi Singh.