Sunrise is an eerie, incandescent, transcendent electro-acoustic work jointly composed and performed by Jacob Cooper and Steven Bradshaw. Created during the 2020–21 pandemic, this alluring, kaleidoscopic piece grows into a tsunami of sound while it casts an eye (ear) back 100 years to derive its text from a song composed during the 1918 pandemic: Ernest Seitz and Gene Lockhart’s song “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.” Cooper and Bradshaw constructed Sunrise via the internet—Bradshaw recording vocal melodies and improvisations that Cooper subjected to electronic manipulation. In this fashion—back and forth, again and again—they spent a year composing and realizing the music. Cooper and Bradshaw write about Sunrise: “As we watched the world unravel around us, the conceit of the Seitz-Lockhart song began to resonate within us. Apparently we were not alone: Since its initial recording by Edward Allen a century ago, the ballad has been performed and recorded by American musicians that included Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Les Paul and Mary Ford, and Willie Nelson. Each performance seems framed by its own distinctive sense of calamity—one imagines the artists grappling with their generations’ darkest moments, while awaiting the relief of an awakening and rebirth. But we were not interested in producing a straightforward rendition of ‘The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.’ Instead, we used it as inspiration for a wholly new piece, one that refracts a classic American song through the prism of COVID-era desperation. Melodic and harmonic material from the song itself appears mostly in phantom traces, or momentary samplings of early 20th-century recordings, while Lockhart’s original lyrics are transformed through reconfiguration, isolation, repetition, and change of inflection.” [CD in 6-panel wallet]