As SydeBoob Duo, soprano Anna Elder and flutist Sarah Steranka perform bold and athletic repertoire with an inviting sense of familiarity that encourages deep listening. Their debut album Au Naturel (New Focus Recordings, 2026) showcases foundational works from their repertoire by Rebecca Saunders, Ramin Akhavijou, Anthony Braxton, Max Johnson, Eric Moe, and Beat Furrer. What unites these technically demanding, free-flowing, and heady compositions — and what ultimately makes the album so compelling — is a heightened focus on timbre, gesture, and the raw qualities of sound.
In O Yes & I, Saunders uses James Joyce’s Ulysses as a platform to explore wide-ranging composite timbres between the flute and voice. The text specifically comes from the final chapter of Joyce’s novel, in which the character Molly Brown reflects on her life in a raw and stream-of-consciousness soliloquy. Although the text is often obscured by frequent pauses, percussive consonants, and overlapping material, the tense energy and emotional landscape rings clear. The duo navigates the work’s fluid form and pointillistic gestures with a gripping sense of cohesion; Elder and Steranka demonstrate a refined ear and masterful control as they imitate one another across a variety of extended techniques.
Akhavijou’s She is There amplifies the incisive rhythmic elements of Gertrude Stein’s poetry with parallel musical elements in the flute and voice. Fragments of the text recur throughout; sometimes they are spoken straight, sometimes intoned on a single pitch, and other times muttered sotto voce or even through the flute. Akhavijou deftly creates space for long phrases that sputter, flutter, and dance with varying densities, periodically punctuated by a single ritualistic beat of a drum.
Composition No. 304 by Braxton features a homophonic texture that oscillates between a disjointed chant style and scampering staccato flourishes. In the middle of the piece, time comes to a standstill as the duo improvises with a cornucopia of delicious techniques such as whistle tones, pitched and unpitched air sounds, shifting harmonics, fricative vocals, and modulating long tones.
Translucent Yawn by Johnson sets a text by Todd Colby against a restless and wandering flute. Outside of a few athletic solos that give structure to the work’s somewhat improvised feel, the flute typically shadows the voice throughout, shrouding it in airy resonance. In these duo sections, it is almost as if we hear Elder’s vocals from behind a gossamer veil of sound: delicate, otherworldly, and colored by Steranka’s expressive musings.
In The Frontierswomen, Eric Moe sets a darkly whimsical poem by Mikko Harvey in which a woman is plagued by memory loss resulting from a family of microscopic women who burrowed into her brain. With such a captivating and bizarre premise, I took to the internet to read the full poem before listening, which provided a helpful window into this composition. Moe navigates the narrative twists and turns of the text with a lithe, recitative-like style, and the duo in turn executes the work’s ample melodic leaps, explosive dynamic changes, and fluid sense of timing with ease.
Invocation VI by Furrer is driven by an impressive array of short sounds in every color. Like the scales of an iridescent deep-sea fish, the varying rhythmic motives tightly interlock and shimmer with frequent changes in composite timbre. Elder and Steranka are at their most virtuosic here, as they keep a firm hold on the reins despite the work’s wild disposition, breakneck speed, and demanding technical challenges. A true showpiece, Invocation VI is the perfect nightcap for a debut album that encapsulates a vibrant aesthetic ethos.
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