Artist Statement: "I wrote a set of songs, dialogues between myself and the animal inside that rears its ugly head when someone I love betrays me. When someone I lust after refuses me. When I am alone with myself and, trembling, left to confront my beast nature. Unruly, destructive and ravenous.  The feminine beast has an ancestral wound of injustice woven into it’s sinews that incites an ancient rage. It howls, it scratches, it is cruelly and methodically ignored, prematurely pacified, fearfully abandoned. I sat with this beast for two years and let it speak. I watched it take over my body and mind in fits of dark nights of the soul, unquenchable desires and all consuming fits of rage. I couldn’t find a way out so I made a way through, not in spite of, but in solidarity with my inner beast.  No answers here, just presence, inquiry and steadfast solidarity." - Hope Littwin ------- Press: “Wild Beast is cold, withdrawn wickedness ... you’re so yourself that you’re beside yourself, consumed ... blood thirsty, neurotic, maximalist, visceral, disemboweling” — MARCUS BRODERICK ----- Album Notes Vocals/Guitar/Piano: Hope Littwin Bass: Jon Nadel Drums: Blake Jiracek Piano: Hana Fugisaki Trombone: Bryant Smith Oboe: Jen Gardner Violin: Mallory Linehan Cello: Jeremy Seeman Mixed by Hope and Robert Littwin Mastered by Hope and Robert Littwin Recorded by Dylan Oakley and Victoria Salazar at Tribeca Flashpoint Produced by Hope Littwin All Songs Written and Arranged by Hope Littwin © Hope Littwin 2017, all right reserved. Album cover artwork by Aemi Kato-Cuarezma ----- ABOUT: Hope Littwin is a Chicago-based composer who creates and performs experimental lyric theater. Expansive and visceral, her work lives in the extremes of archaic and futuristic, exploring the voice/body connection and building lyric neo-mythologies for the contemporary stage and screen. She is drawn to renaissance vocal works; electro-acoustic communications and crossover; jazz; songwriters of the 60s; devised theater; film; dance and light sculpture. Hope is releasing her second full length studio album, Wild Beast, in the summer of 2017 while working as a freelance singer and composer. ----- Biography Hope Littwin was recently awarded a graduate assistantship at Columbia College Chicago's Music Composition for the Screen Graduate program (class of 2018). She has composed for Alma Dance Theater, CUBE Ensemble, Gaudete Brass, Walkabout Theater and for various Films, Musicals and Animations in Chicago, New York and Mumbai. Hope grew up in Seattle and Miami performing with Miami's New International Ballet Company and New World School of The Arts' Musical Theater Ensemble and graduated from Chicago College of Music (2013), with a double major in Classical Voice and Music Composition. She was raised in the theater, acting and singing in plays and musicals and as an apprentice dancer with New Century Ballet Company before she picked up guitar and began writing songs. From songs, Hope moved to arranging music for acapella groups, composing and engineering electronic music and composing for chamber ensembles and orchestras.