Photo: Angel Ceballos

Seattle’s Jherek Bischoff is joining the likes of Owen Pallett and Nico Muhly in shortening the gap between indie and classical music with his new album Composed — which grew out of a desire in which he saw a void in crossover indie/classical music. “I didn’t want to just have an orchestra make a rock [record],” Bischoff says. “I come from many years of playing in bands and I wanted to approach this project as ‘The orchestra is the band’.” So, it makes sense that he asked David Byrne, who’s written for an orchestra before (The Forest), to join him on the ukulele-laden “Eyes.” Opening with a lofty strings arrangement and percussive dissonance, the song contracts and widens like a film score with a flickering bass line and Byrne’s elongated vocals — or like the very title of the track, “Eyes,” which was the one-word prompt Bischoff gave to Byrne to write the lyrics from. Byrne does not disappoint with cryptic lines like “suburban town, how I can pick you out before you’re gone,” but the part most worth waiting for is when the song dwindles to a few stray piano notes at the end, finishing as strongly as it begins.

Composed is out June 5 on Brassland and also features Bischoff working with Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, Wilco’s Nels Cline, Carla Bozulich, Mirah and Craig Werden.