It isn’t often that performers approach microtonal music armed only with a set of tuning forks and their own ingenuity — but for an ensemble like Ekmeles, such resources are no deterrent. In their individual careers, ensemble members Charlotte Mundy, Elisa Sutherland, Timothy Parsons, Tomás Cruz, Steven Hrycelak, and Jeffrey Gavett (director) all engage in projects that bring them to the precipice of singability; but as an ensemble, these six virtuosos are even greater than the sum of their admittedly formidable parts. Their new album Nonsongs (May 2026, New Focus Recordings) contains only three pieces. Yet on this compact, one-hour recording, Ekmeles offers a multidimensional portrait of their interest in microtonality.
The title of the opening track, Plainsound Motet for Ekmeles: DADA NONO & REJOICE, is our first hint about the nature of the journey we’re embarking upon. Not simply a catchy portmanteau, Plainsound refers to a community of composers, performers, and music theorists who write and realize music that experiments with just intonation. Deeply involved in Plainsound, composer Wolfgang von Schweinitz plays with the dissonances of monophony and early polyphony in this “plainsound motet.” Ekmeles begins with a drone of unisons, zooming in on the intricacies of one pitch and using overtone singing to highlight different tones in its harmonic series. Rapidly, however, the piece expands into perfect intervals, then finally emerges fully-fledged into an off-kilter contrapuntal style that characterizes the bulk of the piece.
Achieving a timbre remarkably close to an actual pipe organ, Ekmeles tackles both powerful tutti walls of sound and sudden changes from one vowel to another with absolute accuracy. Their stunning dynamism of timbre and microtonal inflection animates the music, transforming intricate constructions of intervals into something that can be personified: dark and threatening, or playful and even boisterous. One could imagine this piece being set in a medieval church, where long tails of resonance overlap to echo several seconds worth of plainchant at once.
Despite clocking in at just under seven minutes, Katherine Balch’s forgetting feels comparable in scale through its sheer intensity. Such a force of sound is achieved in Balch’s inventive pairing of a chorus of voices with a corresponding chorus of ratchets. All this subverts a diminutive beginning: the ratchets are initially cranked slowly, and their sharp, tinny articulations fall in step with a jumble of aggressive vocables and fragments of distinguishable text from Katie Ford’s 2020 poem “estrangement.” Eventually the text pulls through more decisively: “practice,” “forgetting,” “impossible.”
Soon, Balch’s setting shifts from secco fragments to intersecting, colliding statements of quickly declaimed text. If the ratchets feel in opposition to the poem’s main character or as some pernicious force, the final minute sees them become a rising tide that threatens any semblance of voice. As if melting, the final chord glissandos down slowly as it is increasingly drowned out by the cacophony of the ratchets; in a final act of rebellion, the vocalists pop a sforzando stinger to close.
In another timbral pairing of great variety and nuance, George Lewis’ Lone Coast orchestrates the voices of Ekmeles alongside accordion, performed utterly fearlessly by Iwo Jedynecki. Like the previous track, Lone Coast took shape from a poem, this time “Lone Coast Anacrusis” by Nathaniel Mackey. Lewis’ setting is deeply enjoyable, not only because of the sensitivity of his timbral composites or the creativity of his text painting. Most often, it is because he seizes every opportunity for dramatization, and he does not shy away from the source poem’s gritty, at times obsessive tone. In one especially powerful moment, the ensemble abruptly shifts from mellifluously dovetailing chains of duos and trios to a chorus of haglike snarls, declaiming “like a dreamer” atop a frenetically sawing accordion. The virtuosic work shows Ekmeles’ members in complete lockstep: each unison release and in-tandem swoop of contour happens with absolute precision, executed by a team with both skill and trust.
Music that goes beyond incidental microtonality, like much of the music that Ekmeles champions, can sometimes come off with a bad reputation for being contrived beyond the point of “feeling it.” But on Nonsongs, Ekmeles contradicts that narrative, persuading audiences that committed, attentive performers can surmount those technical or theoretical obstacles to bring real verve to the listening experience.
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