Bio

Oracle Hysterical is twin brothers Doug Balliett (double bass, viola da gamba) and Brad Balliett (bassoons), Majel Connery (vocals, keys), Elliot Cole (vocals, guitars, keys), and Dylan Greene (percussion). Part band, part book club, Oracle Hysterical combines eclectic musical influences with literary breadth. All members of the group perform and compose, with each project developed collectively.

Oracle’s works occupy the fluid space between classically-inclined song-cycle and art-rock concept album. The group’s songwriting illuminates fragments of great literary works like a child in a dark forest with a flashlight. Text sources have ranged from Grimms' Fairy Tales to Greek tragedy, and falsely-attributed Shakespeare, all in collections of songs that distill centuries-old writing through a unique contemporary lens.

Most recently, Oracle wrote Terra Nova, a cycle on problematic explorers, at the invitation of Hub New Music. Terra Nova premiered at Peabody Essex Museum March 2020 and included texts from Robert Falcon Scott, James Audubon, Amelia Earhart, the harrowing Spanish Requirement of 1513, and the highly controversial theory of pre-Columbian exploration of North America by Chinese mariners. Terra Nova has since been performed on the steps of Central Library (Grand Army Plaza) and the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art (Snug Harbor, Staten Island), presented by 5 Boroughs New Music Festival, in May 2020. Zachary Woolfe, writing for the New York Times, called the performance “superb.”

The group’s project, Hecuba, on Euripides’ play of the same name was released on the National Sawdust Tracks label in May, 2018. Hecuba is a lush and experimental rock-leaning album based on Euripides’ tragedy of the same name. Written around 424 BCE in Athens, Hecuba is a savage story of revenge in which the disgraced queen of Troy, Hecuba, with her city razed and her children murdered, descends from nobility to primal violence. 

Other touring projects include The Sea, a collaboration with the Grammy-nominated orchestra A Far Cry, which commissioned and premiered the work at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2016. In the song-cycle, Oracle Hysterical weaves music from texts by history’s greatest seafarers, explorers, and aquatic fabulists, from Shakespeare to Homer, and John Donne to the Book of Jonah. In 2017, Oracle Hysterical collaborated with period-instrument ensemble New Vintage Baroque on Passionate Pilgrim. The album, released on Naxos/Vision into Art, was called “music that is unstuck in time” by the Wall Street Journal, and what it would sound like if “Belle and Sebastian were to cut a record of Baroque-inspired folk songs,” by the New Yorker.

Other past projects include Cleopatra with the Metropolis Ensemble, and The Brothers Grimm with New Vintage Baroque. Oracle has appeared at the MATA Festival, the Berkshire Fringe Festival, The Stone (NYC), The Hideout (Chicago), (le) Poisson Rouge (NYC), National Sawdust (NYC), the Toledo Museum of Art, and at the Lucerne Festival Academy, where they were Spotlight Artists in 2011.

- DATES - 

JANUARY 17, 2020
Metropolis, NYC

Hub New Music and Oracle Hysterical give a preview showing of their evening length semi-staged song-cycle collaboration Terra Nova as part of HNM’s creative partnership with the Peabody Essex Museum.
INFO
TICKETS

March 7, 2020
Peabody essex museum, Boston, MA

Hub New Music and Oracle Hysterical give the world premiere of their evening length semi-staged song-cycle collaboration Terra Nova as part of HNM’s creative partnership with the Peabody Essex Museum.
INFO
TICKETS

- PAST DATES -

May 6, 2018 - 5pm
HECUBA
at Princeton University
In Taplin Auditorium
Princeton, NJ FREE EVENT

May 11, 2018 - 2pm
LIVE on wnyc
3 hecuba songs

May 13, 2018 - 8pm
HECUBA release SHOW
at National Sawdust
Brooklyn, NY TICKETS / FACEBOOK