In ‘FEATHERS,’ composer Katy Jarzebowski reclaims play as a radical act. Born from her 2021 ballet The Thing with Feathers—a Sundance-backed collaboration with choreographer Emily Adams—the album sheds its stage origins to become something far more elusive and entrancing: a cinematic reverie without pictures, a sonic fable where flutes tremble like wings and thunder collapses like doubt.
It is at once deeply intimate and wildly expansive—a debut that listens like a return to childhood wonder refracted through masterful, adult precision.
Rather than re-record the ballet’s score for album format, Jarzebowski leans into its original bones: 35 minutes of music composed and recorded in the fractured quiet of the pandemic, performed by 20 musicians in scattered rooms and stitched together into a prismatic whole. With field recordings, glass taps, whispered harmonics, and orchestral gestures that soar and recoil, ‘FEATHERS’ doesn’t just evoke ballet—it reimagines what ballet music can be.
There are no timecodes here, no visual beats to hit—only narrative implied by tone and timbre. In “BEAKS,” low-brass growls serve as antagonists to a lilting, plaintive melody. “FLOCKS” layers textures until they shimmer like sunlight off a thousand wings. And in the final track, “STORIES,” strings murmur like memory—alive with echoes, translucent with possibility.
But ‘FEATHERS’ is more than an aesthetic triumph. It’s also a statement of artistic freedom. Jarzebowski’s résumé—recently including an IDA Award nomination for The Fire That Took Her, a Hollywood Music in Media Award for Bubjan, and a place in the Berlinale Talents 2024 cohort—reveals a composer operating at the highest levels of film and dance. And yet this album feels less like a career move than a deeply personal excavation. “I wanted to remember what it was like to create something just for the joy of it,” she says. And she does.
That joy is tangible in every unexpected sonic decision, from the breathy exhale of an accordion “blowhole” to a glockenspiel flitting like fireflies. The album’s production, handled by Skywalker Sound’s Brendan Byrnes and Pete Horner, is immaculate, capturing each microscopic vibration at 96 kHz and giving it room to bloom. Two-time Grammy nominee Judith Kirschner’s mastering ties the experience together with breathtaking clarity.
With ‘FEATHERS’ Jarzebowski joins a growing cadre of composers—Caroline Shaw, Anna Meredith, Mica Levi—who are dismantling classical’s cold marble walls from the inside out. This is music that doesn’t ask to be analyzed but invites you to dream, to remember the first time you believed sound could cast spells.
Glass can sing. Strings can glow like fireflies. And ‘FEATHERS’—equal parts fairy tale, ballet, and quiet rebellion—proves that the imagination is not only alive but soaring.
CONNECT WITH KATY JARZEBOWSKI
References
Present PR. (2025). Katy Jarzebowski’s FEATHERS Is a Dazzling, Genre-Defying Ballet of Sound. Retrieved from [Email communication].
Hi, I’m Erick Ycaza — a music blogger with a BA in Advertising & Graphic Design. I created this blog to keep you updated with daily music news. Surprisingly, I’ve been writing about music since 2007. If you’re an artist and would like to be featured, feel free to reach out: info@electrowow.net
