For Real Life, Attacca Quartet notably worked in the studio with GRAMMY® Award-winning composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and Snarky Puppy bandleader Michael League. On the album, the group— Amy Schroeder [violinist], Domenic Salerni [violinist], Nathan Schram [violist], and Andrew Yee [cellist]—re-envision, reshape, and reimagine tracks originally recorded by some of today’s most influential artists in electronic music, including Flying Lotus, Squarepusher, Louis Cole, Anne Müller, Daedelus, and Mid-Air Thief. Many of these producers, as well as guest collaborator TOKiMONSTA, in turn, contributed new layers to Attacca Quartet’s interpretations. Emphasizing the ability to perform all the tracks live as a four-piece, they implemented distortion, plucked and scraped the strings, tapped, and went so far as to reverse the tape itself.

“We thought about what the dream album could be that we hadn’t been able to make until we got this opportunity” says Schram, “and this idea just started to flower;  to bring all the different electronic music we listen to, into our string quartet world and to collaborate with a lot of different musicians, particularly Mike League, while using all the possibilities of music technology to make the biggest string quartet album we could. We all dug really deep into our interests and abilities and created an amazing, experimental, rocking, touching album that is Real Life.”

Attacca Quartet manage to perfect the confluence of classical and electronic with all of the magic of both respective halves intact on Real Life. The musicians intimately amplify the emotional resonances of Flying Lotus’s “Remind U” by weaving in cinematic violin as TOKiMONSTA adds her quintessential club beats and samples. Then, on “Drifting Circles,” they take Anne Müller’s template and widen the scope with wintry violin bouncing off the icy production. Additionally, they serve up two brand new bespoke tracks, namely “Xetaka 1” (feat. Squarepusher) written by Squarepusher and “Holding Breadth” (feat. Daedelus) by Daedelus. 

On Real Life, Attacca Quartet most certainly accomplish that goal of successfully blending musical worlds and breaking down barriers of genre, in the process creating an imitable sound all their own. For Attacca Quartet, they’re only just beginning their music exploration.