We Live the Opposite Daring, the sophomore album from the New York-based vocal sextet Ekmeles, is immediately magnificent. Released Feb. 16 on New Focus Recordings, the album is a tour de force in contemporary vocal music, featuring a massive variety of techniques, approaches, and styles, while never losing sight of its expressive power in these technical pursuits.
The album opens with James Weeks’ Primo Libro, a series of 18 continuous madrigals for one, two, or four voices, cast in 31-tone equal temperament. This tuning system means that each neighboring tone is approximately one-fifth of a whole-step apart, as opposed to the half-steps used in most Western music. This allows for much finer control of intervals and lines, as well as more ‘pure’ harmonies that closely match simple ratio relationships. But it also requires incredible skill from the performers in producing these extremely precise intervals. Luckily, Ekmeles is up to the task, bringing this work vividly to life. Every detail is immaculately rendered, creating vibrant, resonant harmonies that dazzlingly shift and slide about in this incredible work.
Based on texts by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, Zosha Di Castri’s We live the opposite daring begins simply with body percussion and slowly stacking harmonies before rapidly expanding out into a dense kaleidoscope of semi-independent voices. Di Castri uses a downward slide as a primary motif in the first two movements, building into a powerful climax that gradually sighs away. Ekmeles’ performance of the sensitive final movement, which highlights the lyrical qualities of Sappho’s poetry, is particularly stirring; they sing the subtle and deceptively complex music breathtakingly, with absolute grace and poise.
Zosha Di Castri–Photo by David Adamcyk
Hannah Kendall’s this is but an oration of loss begins with a dissonant array of harmonicas that saturate the audio spectrum, creating a dense curtain of sound through which voices slowly emerge: fragmented, spoken, whispered, and sung. The piece reconfigures text from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, a book-length poem about the drowning of 130 enslaved Africans, thrown off the British slave ship Zong in the Caribbean in 1781. The piece is tense, anxious, and dense throughout, struck through with an air of lamentation that conveys the seriousness and tragic horror of its subject.
Meanwhile, Shawn Jaeger’s love is evokes Ligeti with disjointed, rhythmic singing and extensive use of distinct vocal timbres that remind me of the Nonsense Madrigals. This setting of text by American feminist author bell hooks also includes significant spoken passages, which are handled as readily and expressively by the ensemble members as their sung work. In particular, the solos midway through the work are both extremely difficult and extremely well executed, with the transitions between spoken and sung tones handled convincingly by each singer. Eventually, Jaeger builds to a powerful climax that breaks out into wild melismas, foreshadowed by the repetition of “crashing” and “smashing” earlier in the work.
Shawn Jaeger — Photo by Arthur Moeller
Jeffrey Gavett originally wrote Waves for voices and Oliver Beer’s Vessel Orchestra, which was a sound installation that used microphone feedback in hollow objects to create resonance. Vessel Orchestra no longer exists, so Gavett repurposed the piece using recorded samples of Ekmeles’ singing to explore near unisons that produce the auditory effect of beating. The result is strikingly otherworldly, as voices move, jump, and interact in ways that feel simultaneously human and inhuman.
The final work, Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece 36, features the widest variety of vocal effects, running a vast gambit of clicks, whistles, breaths, fricatives, and more things than can be named. To generate material, Gee recorded and cataloged 150 improvised vocal sounds that became the source for the work. Despite this outward strangeness, the piece is immediately approachable with interesting, and at times even groovy, rhythmic schemes and expertly crafted harmonies that keep the piece grounded. Each of the movements shares materials and ideas, but remains distinct, helping the work maintain a sense of freshness throughout. The final movement is particularly excellent, with Gee using extended vocal techniques in the context of a slowly developing choral setting. Ekmeles is at their finest here, demonstrating their mastery of both traditional and experimental vocal styles and creating a wonderfully intriguing and moving vocal texture.
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