With The Sea (Notice Recordings), composer Francisco del Pino and soprano Charlotte Mundy make a compelling case for the distinctive versatility of the human voice and the uniquely vibrant poetry of Victoria Cóccaro. In accord with many of Cóccaro’s writings, The Sea is a stream of unfettered thoughts bleeding relentlessly into one another in surprising ways – a free association of colorful, highly descriptive images suspended in time. The startling outpouring of scenery meanders mysteriously through a twisted network and inspires wonder and reflection without a sense of when the journey will end.
The evocative text, in an excellent English translation by Rebekah Smith, might be described as a perpetual unfurling of imagery. Within a few lines, we are tasked to ponder the essence of writing and reading, death and dying (“the name of dying is / the sound of drying gelatin / the vapor from dry ice, in shards / at the bottom of the bag…”), and to consider how sleep and pain perhaps relate to what might be unfolding at the bottom of the sea.
Building on his earlier settings of Cóccaro’s poetry that appear on Decir (New Amsterdam Records, 2021), del Pino embraces the structure of the text in The Sea and Material, a companion piece. He describes these two works as “essentially a sort of gigantic round canon… each functioning as a refracted mirror for the other.” In both works, del Pino relies solely on the human voice and the technology that can manipulate it to create the entirety of the sonic landscape.
Material begins the album with an abstract environment of syllabic utterances layered one upon another, sometimes landing in consonant harmonies and other times quite dissonantly, but always shifting. Over time, the 30-minute work draws the listener in with a soothing, continuously rolling topography of peaks and valleys.
Washes of sound swell and fade away organically, with pitches ranging from warm lower tones to high siren-like sighs; Mundy’s clarion, bell-like soprano shimmers in each register. Here, in particular, del Pino demonstrates that with the right collaborator, a vast sonic experience can unfold from the human voice alone.
The Sea is a more literal setting of Cóccaro’s poem and opens with a simple arpeggiated declaration that repeats throughout the work: “the sea shifts like / thought / like thoughts / when you think under water.” Mundy’s pure soprano declaims the poem’s text earnestly against a sustained backdrop of her pre-recorded vocals overlapping on a reverberated loop, not unlike a plainchant melody sung above a simple drone – modern day organum, perhaps. In this case, however, the solo vocal line is mostly monotonous – like a meditation mantra – with long phrases of the poem elegantly shaped by Mundy on the same note over a backdrop of ostinato melodies.
With few dramatic shifts in dynamics or changes in color or texture from start to finish, the 20-minute work feels like floating through the aural equivalent of Cóccaro’s meandering, circuitous poem, swirling on until the end, which comes quietly with the same refrain one last time, “the sea shifts like / thought / like thoughts / when you think under water.”
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