Battle Trance’s latest album entitled “Green of Winter” will be released on August 26th . This release is the third of  the New Amsterdam Records Trilogy composed by ensemble member Travis Laplant, along with “Palace of Wind” and “Blade of Love. Tenor Saxophonists,  Travis Laplante, Patrick Breiner, Matt Nelson, and Jeremy Viner, comprise a quartet that lives and works and plays in the seams between contemporary classical and avant-garde jazz push themselves to the limit, shedding new light on the saxophone as an ensemble instrument. The players use circular breathing to build continuous, hypnotic waves of sound; multiphonics layer to create intricate textures that seem to come from an ancient time; and blisteringly fast lines seem to liquefy into each other. Unorthodox articulations and unusual fingerings are also part of the vast sonic vocabulary that the members of Battle Trance have painstakingly mastered. However, these compositions are not merely concerned with demonstrating the virtuosity of the ensemble, nor with impressing or entertaining the listener. Instead, they are  meant to be a portal of resonance where there is no separation between the listener and the sound.

The first release, Palace of Wind embraces both the cerebral nature of composition and the visceral act of performance, immediately locating itself, the musicians and the audience in a purely spiritual space. It is a new kind of music and therefore modern, and yet it's absolutely primordial, the transformative act of human beings blowing air through tubes and producing something timeless. To develop this style there was extensive training in dissolving the distinct individual identities of the players into the greater collective sound: The band did various long-tone exercises, similar to group meditation, the purpose being to blend together into one sound, so that the origin of the collective sound's components is completely impossible to discern - even by the members of the ensemble.

The central focus of the ensemble’s second release,  Blade of Love,  is on the physical and spiritual intersection of the saxophone and the human body. The saxophone is one of the few instruments that literally enters the body of the person playing it, and Blade of Love is a medium for this sacred meeting place, with each member of Battle Trance using the saxophone as a vessel for the human spirit. - "There were certain specific sounds that I imagined being in Blade of Love, writes composer and ensemble member Laplante,  but I couldn't get close enough to them using traditional saxophone tone — sounds like arrows flying through the air, birds singing or flying overhead, bombs, water running, the wind, campfires, singing in church, making love, killing, waves crashing, fighting for your life, thunder, the sound of rage, howling, crying, laughing, the sound of my last breath… So I began working on different ways for the saxophone to get closer to these sounds, and the resulting techniques became part of the fabric of Blade of Love."

Green of Winter, the third album in the trilogy, is a work of beauty and mystery cultivated from the deep friendship between Battle Trance’s four members. This new release intimately explores the connection between the human body and the human breath, a connection that composer Travis Laplante hones as a Qigong practitioner; by using the technique of circular breathing to create hypnotic waves of sound and layered saxophone multiphonics, or chords, Battle Trance weaves intricate, ancient textures that shed fresh light on the saxophone as an ensemble instrument.