VICTOIRE

“The composer and keyboardist Missy Mazzoli has a thing for unlikely connections and startling gestures, and one of her gifts is the ability to tease out the hidden logic behind her choices. Her ravishing, unsettling album “Vespers for a New Dark Age” unfolds as a meditation on technology and spirituality, alienation and self-interest.” - Nate Chinen, The New York Times review of "Vespers for a New Dark Age," March 2015.

 “Mazzoli’s ensemble Victoire, cleverly orchestrated, provides settings both cinematic and intimate at once, while Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche adds evocative scrims of percussion and some thunderous pounding.” - Thomas Huizenga on NPR’s First Listen, March 2015.

“Music that once sounded like the lonely movement of your own thoughts now calls out to you in a voice of its own. The singers are bell-clear and troubled, like Julia Holter if she suffered insomnia.” - Jayson Greene, Pitchfork.com review of "Wayward Free Radical Dreams," March 2015.

 “Casts a powerful spell…Mazzoli has fashioned an engrossing classical-electronic-vocal epic that sounds like the product of a much larger ensemble than the chamber-sized one it actually is.” - Textura review of "Vespers for a New Dark Age," March 2015.

"Mazzoli's compositions have been nothing but excellent, powerful and thought-provoking, and Saturday night's premiere of "Vespers for a New Dark Age" continued the stream of works by Mazzoli that leave you in awe." - Baeble Music's Stephanie Orentas, February 2014.

Pitchfork premiere of A Thousand Tongues: "the most striking and uncanny music Victoire have ever made." - Jayson Greene, February 2014.

"Invitingly quirky...evocative and alluring." - The New York Times's Allan Kozinn, a review of Victoire's show at the River to River Festival, July 2012.

“A dream world with a touch of blackness…The audience is cradled into an enchanting dream world in which they would have loved to linger much longer than the hour long concert allowed.” - Vasterbottens Kuriren, Umea, Sweden (Review of the M.A.D.E. Festival, May 2012)

“It was refreshing to hear Mazzoli’s accomplished work and the fevered, excellent playing of her ensemble.” - Feast of Music, review of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Festival at BAM, May 2012

"Victoire condense moments of focused beauty and quiet conviction from the pandemic distractions of modern life. 7.8" – Pitchfork

Top 10 classical albums of 2010 – NPR

One of 2010′s most memorable albums - Alex Ross, The New Yorker

Top 10 classical albums of 2010 - Time Out New York

2010 Holiday Gift Guide - The New York Times

“Every once and awhile an artist/ensemble creates a sound so vast and original that all you can say about it is that it “defies categorization,” that fail-safe phrase that more or less means open you ears, open your heart and let the music in. Victoire’s new album Cathedral City deserves such a phrase.” - New York Examiner

“Is Victoire’s music post-rock, post-mimimalist or pseudo-post-pre-modernist indie-chamber-electronica? It doesn’t particularly matter. It’s just good music.” - NPR’s First Listen

"Both familiar and entirely foreign, the music of the Brooklyn-based band could easily be the soundtrack to your dreams-assuming you are a fever-stricken genius." – Paste Magazine

"an all-star, all-female quintet" – Time Out New York

Indie Chamber Music, with Victoire - WNYC

“Perhaps the ocean is the most apropos metaphor for Cathedral City, as each song is rich with depth and mystery, and there’s just enough chaos to keep a fine storm brewing.” - Venus Zine

“Cathedral City is just as much an exhilarating excursion as it is a welcome release from the speed of life. 8 stars.” – Popmatters.com

“This cross-genre album brings each separate influence a bit closer to the mainstream, without an ounce of homogenization.  Brooklyn’s best-kept secret is about to become public knowledge.” – The Silent Ballet (Band of the Week)

“[Missy Mazzoli's] distinctive sound reveals a nod to what might called traditional minimalism and another nod to rock. There’s energy and occasional grit, but, more than anything else, a beguiling subtlety and beauty.” - Baltimore Sun

“It can’t be easy creating music that’s eminently accessible and at the same time sophisticated and complex, but that’s exactly what the band’s founder and composer Missy Mazzoli has accomplished so convincingly on the forty-five-minute follow-up to the group’s earlier EP A Door into the Dark. [Victoire] integrates classical minimalism and electronic music into a seamless hybrid.” – Textura

“With Victoire, her electro-acoustic quintet, Ms. Mazzoli played successful club dates, made a splash at the Bang on a Can Marathon in June and released “A Door Into the Dark,” a digital EP of four elegant, moody pieces, via the Web site eMusic.com.” - The New York Times

“Despite smooth surfaces, you couldn’t miss incongruous details, like the lascivious droop of Ms. Mack’s clarinet in the prim “A Door Into the Dark,” and the grate of disembodied, recorded voices in “I Am Coming for My Things.” Ms. Oppenheim’s warm, round notes bounced against a glitch pattern in “Cathedral City,” and her plaintive, flutelike bowing gave “India Whiskey” a vulnerable edge.” - The New York Times

“It is rare that an artist ticks all my boxes—glitchy lo-fi electronics, rhythmic instability, microtones, meandering melodies, ostinato, and sampled vocals to name a few—and even rarer to hear them woven together seamlessly. And yet, with Cathedral City, Victoire have done just that.” - Indie Handbook

“Cathedral City is an album you’ll throw on and marvel at the small nuances present throughout this gorgeous chamber rock release.” - Innocent Words Magazine

“Whip smart… [Victoire's] inventive forthcoming debut album, Cathedral City, is a cool, creepy amalgamation of main songsmith Mazzoli’s classical influences and the indie bands she adores.” - Time Out Chicago

“When music is as subtle and as deep as the music on this album, that is where artistic mastery shines. Mazzoli blends these two approaches seamlessly creating a work that is as hard hitting as the best indie release and as nuanced and intelligent as any art music.” - Ryan Manchester

“It was so cool to see five fashionable dressed young women (a mostly “Mad Men” look) playing violin, bass, clarinet and keyboards WITHOUT singing or dancing! That’s progress, in my opinion.  As is the music. It is really a tasty concoction of post-minimalist harmony with pop structure and pacing.” - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"fascinating" – South Carolina Arts Times

“kind of ravishing” - Daniel Stephen Johnson

"minimalist post-rock bliss" – Feast of Music