“The music on Dynamic Maximum Tension consists mostly of portraits of people—Buckminster Fuller and Alan Turing and Mae West and Duke Ellington,” composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue says of his upcoming album with his Secret Society ensemble in a new video about the making of the album filmed at Power Station at BerkleeNYC in New York City during its recording. You can watch the video, directed by Reuben Hernandez, below.

“I’ve been incredible blessed that the musicians in Secret Society have been very fiercely loyal to me and to the music, most of them for many, many years now,” he says. “One of the great things about having a band with eighteen people in it is that you have eighteen different potential sources of individual inspiration from each of these musicians.”

He goes on to explain: “I tried to think about, well, what are the places in my life where I turn to look for optimism and inspiration and the idea that the future is something to be anticipated rather than dreaded. So that’s the impetus for so much of the music on this record—to look to a period in the past where the future seemed brighter than it does today, and to try to find a way to represent that optimism about the future in music some way.”

Dynamic Maximum Tension is due September 8 on Nonesuch; you can pre-order the album and hear two tracks from it here. Argue and Secret Society celebrate the release of Dynamic Maximum Tension with a four-night run at New York City’s Jazz Gallery, September 13–16, performing two sets each night. More information and tickets are available here.