Goal Weight / Maggie Cox & Jennifer Gersten - Keep Telling Yourself That

“Keep Telling Yourself That” is the debut album of the New York City-based experimental bass-violin duo of Jennifer Gersten and Maggie Cox. It is a collection of improvised songs testifying to a frisky, impish, no-holds-barred imagination for acoustic string playing. Bassist Maggie Cox exploits her titanic expressive and dynamic range on an instrument outfitted with gut strings, and violinist Jennifer Gersten transforms a beater violin through object preparations into an engine of ghastly twangs. Jabbing and indistinct, abrasive and sweet, their magnetic language originates in a shared body of musical references that span the centuries, as well as an indomitable sense of humor about the indignities of downtown girlhood in our unprecedented times.

Goal Weight is a New York City-based experimental music duo comprising bassist Maggie Cox and violinist Jennifer Gersten. Their collaboration originated in a 2021 meeting while quarantined together at a celebrity yoga retreat in the Berkshires; under today's rather less stressful circumstances, they’re investigating sonic collisions between their string family siblings.

Marguerite Cox, a double bassist from northeast Ohio, is a versatile and in-demand collaborator in numerous musical settings throughout the United States. A recent alumna of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect fellowship, she performs regularly with A Far Cry, Palaver Strings, and Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players, and counts forthcoming appearances with The Knights, AMOC*, East Coast Chamber Orchestra, Ruckus, Teatro Nuovo, and other chamber ensembles exploring music through the ages. Marguerite received her undergraduate degree at Rice University’s Shepherd School and her master’s at the Curtis Institute, where she was the first bassist to receive that degree.

Jennifer Gersten is a violinist and writer from Queens, New York. A former tenured section violinist in Helsingborg Symfoniorkester (Sweden), she instigates projects within avant-garde and improvised music in the US and Scandinavia. As a journalist, Jennifer has contributed feature reporting and music criticism to The New York Times, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Gramophone, Rolling Stone, and The Washington Post, among other publications. As a violinist, she has performed with such groups as TAK Ensemble, Norwegian Radio Broadcasting Orchestra, and Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra. She holds a DMA and MM from Stony Brook and a BA in English from Yale.