The latest GRAMMY-nominated recording by engineer/producer duo Ulrike Schwarz and Jim Anderson, Picturing the Invisible: Focus 1, is featured on this month’s digital cover of MIX. The 4-page story highlights the mind-boggling recording process that “pushed [soprano saxophonist and composer Jane Ira Bloom] to the creative limits,” and ultimately led to a nomination for Best Immersive Audio Album at the 65th Annual GRAMMY Awards®. Recorded by Ulrike Schwarz in Ultra High Resolution (384kHz/32bit) using the internet for communication between musicians, Picturing the Invisible: Focus 1 represents the intersection of audio science and improvisational art in an all-encompassing, 3D musical experience.
GRAMMY-Award winner Jane Ira Bloom, the first musician commissioned by the NASA Art Program (and has an asteroid named after her!), has been steadfastly developing her singular voice on the soprano saxophone for over 40 years. Picturing the Invisible: Focus 1 finds her collaborating with (and inspired by) fellow trailblazing women in the arts. The 8-song collection was inspired by the science photography of NYC photographer Berenice Abbott and features percussionist Allison Miller, recently named a “rising star drummer” by Downbeat, and Koto player Miya Masaoka. The project was recorded by acclaimed tonmeister Ulrike Schwarz with cutting edge technology that allowed the musicians to improvise together in real time over the internet. With Schwarz at the helm, and Bloom’s unique ability to “convey more of the human spirit than most remote collaborations” (Downbeat), WBGO writes that “the distance was no match for their musical bond.”
Picturing the Invisible: Focus 1 was funded by a prestigious grant from the NYC Women's Fund for Media, Music, & Theatre by the City of New York's Mayor's Office of Media & Entertainment in association with the NY Foundation for the Arts.
Listen to Picturing the Invisible: Focus 1 in Stereo, 5.1 Surround Sound and Immersive Audio HERE.
Album credits and liner notes HERE.
About Ulrike Schwarz of Anderson Audio NY:
A broadly acclaimed engineer and producer, Ulrike Schwarz is a trailblazing audio innovator with more than two decades of experience across the film, television, radio, and recording industries. Born and raised in Germany, Schwarz discovered she had perfect pitch at an early age, and as a teenager, she became one of only three students to be accepted into the exclusive Tonmeister program at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin. After earning her degree, Schwarz worked with German public radio and spent more than ten years serving as the senior sound engineer for large orchestral and jazz productions at the famed Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich, where she broke the mold as a woman in a male-dominated field and garnered numerous honors for her recordings and broadcasts, including multiple Echo Klassik, Diamant D’Opera, Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenindustrie, and Diapason d’Or awards. In 2015, Schwarz moved to New York full time to team up with her now-husband and production partner Jim Anderson, with whom she’s created a groundbreaking body of work in the field of immersive audio. As creative technically as she is artistically, Schwarz designed and built her own custom portable recording setup from scratch, and in just the last few years alone, she’s garnered multiple Grammy nominations for her work with artists as diverse as American jazz stalwart Patricia Barber and contemporary Norwegian composer Gisle Kverndokk. In 2022, Schwarz was named Vice President of the Verband Deutscher Tonmeister (The Association of German Sound Professionals) and received a prestigious grant from the Women’s Fund of the New York Foundation of the Arts for her work on Jane Ira Bloom’s Picturing The Invisible – Focus 1.
