Sbowe – Bat Hat CD

Sbowe – Bat Hat CD

Bat Hat is the first full-length album by Sbowe, the solo project of Calabria, Italy-based cellist and composer Rachel Icenogle. Sbowe thrives in the scratchy, creaky, whirly sounds the cello can make, layering diverse musical textures in a lush groundwork for wild fables about insects and impressionistic stories about human batteries. About her most recent EP Morimus (2022), Breaking & Entering Milwaukee wrote, “...the two tracks here create massive, textural, exquisite movements that feel poetic as they feel intentional. It’s like we’re observing both the gorgeous and tense moments of nature unfold in real time, punctuated by a variety of cello sounds.”

Sbowe makes music that has been compared to Laurie Anderson and Stereolab. On Bat Hat, nature and our place as humans in it takes front and center stage, while themes of impostor syndrome and grief-reckoning also wind through its songs. Kate Wakefield of the band Lung observed that the album is, “a mysterious, intriguing journey through the woods of [Sbowe’s] brain.” Layers of cello are often accompanied by drums, accordion, violin, viola, clarinet, and trumpet, in arrangements that span austere unisons to full floral blooms.