#Shara Nova

[fighttherealterror]

shara in illinoise ♥️

[chaoselph]

Colin Stetson | "Lord I just can't keep from crying sometimes"

[burlveneer-music]

Akropolis Reed Quintet - Hymns for Private Use - Shara Nova turns up on this album too, singing Nico Muhly’s titular song cycle

Hymns for Private Use is the 5th album released by the Detroit-based Akropolis Reed Quintet and features original works by composers Annika Socolofsky and Nico Muhly. On Socolofsky’s so much more, Akropolis is joined by 7 small business owners from 4 states whose personal stories of community and sacrifice are woven together on a spoken word track, sourced from over 7 hours of interviews conducted in 2020. Soprano Shara Nova joins Akropolis on Muhly’s Hymns for Private Use, which draws upon 5 spiritual texts from early English sources from the 12th to 18th centuries. These two large-scale works are connected by intimate stories of ambition and devotion made available for each listener’s own “private use.” Tracks composed by: Nico Muhly (1-5) and Annika Socolofsky (6-10) Produced by: Courtney Snyder Ng (1-5) and Annika Socolofsky (6-10) Published by: Nico Muhly (1-5) and Annika Socolofsky (6-10) Engineer: Dave Schall Acoustic Mastered by: Nick Lloyd Scribe: Sean Meyers Cover Art and Album Package Design by Marian C. Holmes Recorded at First Presbyterian Church in Ypsilanti, MI on 7/10/18; Blue Sword Studios in Detroit, MI on 2/10/22 (1-5) and First Presbyterian Church in Ypsilanti, MI on 1/8/22 (6-10)

[knightofleo]

Sarah Kirkland Snider | This Is What You’re Like feat. My Brightest Diamond

It’s true, he talks It’s true, he talks, but it’s not Anything like it was then Anything like it was When he talked the way a bird sings; Just to sing This is what you’re like Do you remember? This is what you once were like

[nathanielbellows]

I have a new single coming out this week (Thurs, Jan 26), which also features the amazing vocals of Shara Nova (aka My Brightest Diamond) and the other musicians from my last single, "Well Water (feat. Shara Nova)". Above is the lyric video I made for "Wall Water (feat. Shara Nova)", and please stay tuned for the new song this week!

Thank you for your interest and support in my work. Happy New Year, everyone!

[onenakedfarmer]

Currently Playing

THE BLUE HOUR

Composers Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, Sarah Kirkland Snider

Text Carolyn Forché

Performers A Far Cry Shara Nova

[sinceileftyoublog]

TORRES, My Brightest Diamond, & Aisha Burns Live Show Review: 1/18, Lincoln Hall, Chicago

TORRES' Mackenzie Scott

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Many times throughout TORRES' set Thursday night at Lincoln Hall, Mackenzie Scott remarked how polite the audience was. While we're from the Midwest and are certainly very nice, I think we were just enraptured. First and foremost, Scott is an intense songwriter whose lyrics are diaristic, who puts her whole body into her guitar playing. Live, she demands attention. You never know when she's going to scream--she chose a good moment on "Helen in the Woods"--or show vulnerability with a creaky falsetto, like on love devotional "Gracious Day". Meanwhile, her scraggly guitars followed her vocal delivery on "Skim", as she shredded, leaning towards the crowd. Her atonal laying on "Sprinter" provided a sharp contrast to J.R. Bohannon's shimmery pedal steel. Over 10 years into playing as TORRES, traversing aesthetics and soundscapes, Scott has developed the stage presence to match the ferocity of the songs themselves.

From left to right: J.R. Bohannon, Rosie Slater, Scott, & Erin Manning

But then there was another reason we wanted to remain silent and soak it all in: the new TORRES songs from What an enormous room, out this Friday via Merge. For many in the crowd, this past Thursday was the first time hearing tunes bound to become new favorites in the catalog. I watched smiles form on the faces of folks realizing the plucky "Jerk into joy" will become an anthem, as Scott sang, "What an enormous room / Look at all the dancing I can do!" As as it was the band's second night playing these songs on tour, each member relished their opportunities to stand out, from Rosie Slater's driving drums on "Forever home" to Erin Manning's fried synths on "Happy man's shoes". Towards the end of the set, someone yelled, "Play 'Honey'!," referring to the song that made many of us fall in love with TORRES' music in the first place. They never played it. Had this been the last time TORRES played Lincoln Hall, I might have walked away disappointed. But years later, 6 records in, Scott's catalog runs deep enough that the supposed enormity of "Honey" is a small hike compared to the canyon sounds of her most recent material.

My Brightest Diamond

Jake Woodruff (left) & Aisha Burns (right)

Opening for TORRES was two artists who haven't released full-length albums since 2018 but are experimenting live with new material: My Brightest Diamond, the long-running chamber folk project of singer-songwriter Shara Nova, and multi-instrumentalist/former Balmorhea member Aisha Burns. Nova played solo, using percussion backing tracks and samples, walking out to the audio clip of the late, great Sinead O'Connor saying, "Fight the real enemy" on Saturday Night Live after tearing a picture of Pope John Paul II following her a capella rendition of Bob Marley & The Wailers' "War". Many of Nova's songs, both new and old, responded to O'Connor's fearless spirit. Nova's vocals were show-stopping on "Fight the Real Terror (for Sinead)", controlled over the harmonics of the recorded drums on "Imaginary Lover". Finger-snapping new single "Black Sheep" expanded on themes of ostracization and its oft-permanence even when the court of public opinion changes its mind, pertinent to O'Connor's story. In context, All Things Will Unwind standout "Be Brave", too, acted in spirit with Nova's newer material. "Imagine all the flutes and bass clarinets," Nova quipped to old-school My Brightest Diamond fans, but she didn't need to ask us; lines like, "Shara, this is going to hurt," tugged at our emotions more than any instrumentation could.

Woodruff & Burns

Really, it was up to Aisha Burns to yield happy tears from instruments. Accompanied by guitarist Jake Woodruff, she graced us with atmospheric loops, violin, guitar, and falsetto vocals. Songs from 2018's Argonauta (Western Vinyl) hypnotized the crowd, the dual guitar sway of "I Thought I Knew You Well" and impassionedly picked and sung "We Were Worn". And yes, she performed her great cover of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game", her vibrato and vocal harmonies with Woodruff standing tall against the sensuousness of the original. The performance got me excited for whatever comes next for Burns, whether original material or more clever covers.

Woodruff & Burns

[radiodark]

postcards from downtown- my brightest diamond

[helplessness-blues]

i am the leader of the shara nova fan club

[draculaugust]

my gender is all 25 minutes of Impossible Soul by Sufjan Stevens thanks for asking

[farceargon]

By far the best end screen I've ever got in this game. I killed it with the clutch claw attack and got this beauty...

Here's me taking the nova attack to the face out of morbid curiosity to see what'd happen.

Spoilers: My defense is so absurd that without divine blessing activating I only took slightly below half health from full. I love being a tank :]

[fighttherealterror]

some screen captures of the have you ever seen an angel mv 🫶

- directed by andrew ondrejack

[amnhnyc]

How do we discover new types of objects in space? One way is to invent new kinds of telescopes. Join Museum Curator Michael Shara on an exploration of evolving telescope technologies, the most powerful telescopes ever built, and how the future of stargazing might already be in your pocket.

Along the way, learn about the “wild and crazy��� things stars do through Shara’s research into novas (stellar explosions that often repeat over time) and supernovas (the explosive deaths of stars).

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Hubble finds that a black hole beam promotes stellar eruptions

In a surprise finding, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the blowtorch-like jet from a supermassive black hole at the core of a huge galaxy seems to cause stars to erupt along its trajectory. The stars, called novae, are not caught inside the jet, but apparently in a dangerous neighborhood nearby.

The finding is confounding researchers searching for an explanation. "We don't know what's going on, but it's just a very exciting finding," said lead author Alec Lessing of Stanford University. "This means there's something missing from our understanding of how black hole jets interact with their surroundings."

A nova erupts in a double-star system where an aging, swelled-up, normal star spills hydrogen onto a burned-out white dwarf companion star. When the dwarf has tanked up a mile-deep surface layer of hydrogen that layer explodes like a giant nuclear bomb. The white dwarf isn't destroyed by the nova eruption, which ejects its surface layer and then goes back to siphoning fuel from its companion, and the nova-outburst cycle starts over again.

Hubble found twice as many novae going off near the jet as elsewhere in the giant galaxy during the surveyed time period. The jet is launched by a 6.5-billion-solar-mass central black hole surrounded by a disk of swirling matter. The black hole, engorged with infalling matter, launches a 3,000-light-year-long jet of plasma blazing through space at nearly the speed of light. Anything caught in the energetic beam would be sizzled. But being near its blistering outflow is apparently also risky, according to the new Hubble findings.

The finding of twice as many novae near the jet implies that there are twice as many nova-forming double-star systems near the jet or that these systems erupt twice as often as similar systems elsewhere in the galaxy.

"There's something that the jet is doing to the star systems that wander into the surrounding neighborhood. Maybe the jet somehow snowplows hydrogen fuel onto the white dwarfs, causing them to erupt more frequently," said Lessing. "But it's not clear that it's a physical pushing. It could be the effect of the pressure of the light emanating from the jet. When you deliver hydrogen faster, you get eruptions faster. Something might be doubling the mass transfer rate onto the white dwarfs near the jet." Another idea the researchers considered is that the jet is heating the dwarf's companion star, causing it to overflow further and dump more hydrogen onto the dwarf. However, the researchers calculated that this heating is not nearly large enough to have this effect.

"We're not the first people who've said that it looks like there's more activity going on around the M87 jet," said co-investigator Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. "But Hubble has shown this enhanced activity with far more examples and statistical significance than we ever had before."

Shortly after Hubble's launch in 1990, astronomers used its first-generation Faint Object Camera (FOC) to peer into the center of M87 where the monster black hole lurks. They noted that unusual things were happening around the black hole. Almost every time Hubble looked, astronomers saw bluish "transient events" that could be evidence for novae popping off like camera flashes from nearby paparazzi. But the FOC's view was so narrow that Hubble astronomers couldn't look away from the jet to compare with the near-jet region. For over two decades, the results remained mysteriously tantalizing.

Compelling evidence for the jet's influence on the stars of the host galaxy was collected over a nine-month interval of Hubble observing with newer, wider-view cameras to count the erupting novae. This was a challenge for the telescope's observing schedule because it required revisiting M87 precisely every five days for another snapshot. Adding up all of the M87 images led to the deepest images of M87 that have ever been taken.

Hubble found 94 novae in the one-third of M87 that its camera can encompass. "The jet was not the only thing that we were looking at — we were looking at the entire inner galaxy. Once you plotted all known novae on top of M87 you didn't need statistics to convince yourself that there is an excess of novae along the jet. This is not rocket science. We made the discovery simply by looking at the images. And while we were really surprised, our statistical analyses of the data confirmed what we clearly saw," said Shara.

This accomplishment is entirely due to Hubble's unique capabilities. Ground-based telescope images do not have the clarity to see novae deep inside M87. They cannot resolve stars or stellar eruptions close to the galaxy's core because the black hole's surroundings are far too bright. Only Hubble can detect novae against the bright M87 background.

Novae are remarkably common in the universe. One nova erupts somewhere in M87 every day. But since there are at least 100 billion galaxies throughout the visible universe, around 1 million novae erupt every second somewhere out there.

[wayti-blog]

Condor telescope reveals a new world for astrophysicists

("A view created by Condor and computer technologies of extremely faint shells of ionized gas surrounding the dwarf nova Z Camelopardalis. Credit: Condor Team")

"A new telescope called the "Condor Array Telescope" may open up a new world of the very-low-brightness universe for astrophysicists. Four new papers, published back to back in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) this month, present the first scientific findings based on observations acquired by Condor. The project is a collaborative led by scientists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)."

"The new "array telescope" uses computers to combine light from several smaller telescopes into the equivalent of one larger telescope and is able to detect and study astronomical features that are too faint to be seen with conventional telescopes."

"In the second paper, Shara and colleagues used Condor to reassess an image of the dwarf nova Z Camelopardalis or "Z Cam" obtained by the Kitt Peak National Observatory 4-meter telescope back in January 2007. The image showed a partial shell of gas surrounding Z Cam, which Shara speculated was emitted by a "new star" recorded by Chinese Imperial astrologers in the year 77 BCE."

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[nonesuchrecords]

"That's the mark of good work: if an audience can know nothing about it and just enter into the space and take it in and have an experience that moves them," director-choreographer Justin Peck tells CBS Sunday Morning's Kelefa Sanneh in a feature on the Tony Awards-nominated Broadway show Illinoise: A New Musical. Sanneh talks with Peck, the show's director, choreographer, and book co-writer; playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, who co-wrote the book; and Shara Nova (aka My Brightest Diamond), who performs on the original Sufjan Stevens album Illinois on which the show is based and the just-released cast album.