Described as an Afro-surrealist anti-opera, the double bassist Nick Dunston draws from the poetic and folkloric texts of Octavia E. Butler, Toni Morrison, Ted Chiang, Richard Hugo and Gabriel García Márquez to summon the libretto for one of the records of the year in COLLA VOCE.
Maria Reich on the violin and viola, Anil Eraslan on the cello, Tal Yahalom on the guitar and Moritz Baumgärtner on drums and other percussion provide the accompaniment, while the JACK Quartet – which comprises the violins of Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, the viola of John Richards and Jay Campbell on cello – in Dunston’s own words are engaged in a process of ‘exponentially multiplying resonance and mass’. With the backdrop set, the Brooklyn composer then enlists four outstanding vocalists in the form of the frequent Fire! Orchestra collaborator Sofia Jernberg, the latinx improviser Isabel Crespo Pardo whose levitational poemsongs with Henry Fraser and Lester St. Louis shone brightly on la espalda y su punto radiante earlier this year, Friede Merz who ‘masters the rare art of being in several places at the same time’ and Cansu Tanrıkulu who expands her vocabulary through the use of live processing.
Produced by Weston Olencki – who recently took a sojourn into the staggered heart of Cajun isolation for Longform Editions and sees the blues in every colour from ramshackle steel fabrications to deep azure – COLLA VOCE is full of fractured choruses, sub-operatic swoons and jowly or creaking glottis as the four vocalists use each outcrop and every inch of their orifice, from an inlet and aerated larynx to the tongue as a motorcycle ramp and snarling or puckered lips, often shaping the mouth for its percussive possibilities. Meanwhile crisply articulated strings steadily congeal into fraying and ominous drones, a fledgeling tornado which gathers dust with a rasping sound as it begins to gust and swirl.
‘Ova’churr’ opens with a babble of noise and some throaty distortions, as choral interludes punctuate the short fuse of the track before an oscillating wave of voices flare up like rallying cries. ‘Designated Antagonist’ lugs a sub-bass drone as strings strain and snap, splay and recoil. The first feature-length track on COLLA VOCE, the winding and straying ‘Pseudocorridor’ involves a playful scamper through what soon becomes a hall of mirrors as skittish or distended strings sound in counterpoint to the propulsive high-tailing of Dunston’s bass. The ensemble winds up mired in a radioactive murk, pulled out only through the persistence of the now slowly developing bass line, before an increasingly breathless voice emerges on the shore like a Mary Henry from Carnival of Souls, winded or overcome by shock and therefore incapable of recapitulating what they’ve just witnessed.
Nick Dunston’s cautious handling of the bass, Moritz Baumgärtner’s deftly scattershot percussion and the xenharmonic drones of the JACK Quartet give the impression of something being held at bay. The album standout ‘Blinding, Joyous, Fearful’ opens with squibs of bowed bass which connect in a low arc amid short peals from the violins, violas and cellos, like an alien hand jabbing away at the string section. The bass carries its queasy tone almost to the midpoint of the track, stirring some life out of the strings as it arches through a more plaintive and pastoral melody. Eventually these tapered ends or the diffused beams of their torch lights meet up to swell in strewn harmony, sweeping the area in siren surveillance, like lighthouse foghorns and beacons which have briefly surveyed the coast before turning inland, fixing their sights away from the sea. ‘Fully Turbulent’ then exacerbates some of the underlying anxiety and menace of the previous track, whose treated strings and electronic processing sound out like elongated distress calls before Dunston’s bass takes over, and a squadron of strings loops back to dive-bomb the area.
‘Lo and Behold’ boasts a rubbery toughness, while the short chemical suite of ‘HYDROGEN’, ‘ARGON’ and ‘OXYGEN’ carries along cooing vocals and breathy chuntering, plus some mewing and mawing with the sickly sideburned visage of the Lady in the Radiator over siren alarms. Belying its academic billing, ‘Anglo-Adjacent Phonetic Approximations’ moves from throaty crackling to choral swoons to yodelling and other warbling ululations, with Tal Yahalom’s guitar playing a back-and-forth loop as though in a staggered stupor or scarcely daring to stretch its head above the parapet. Sofia Jernberg and company then unleash a flurry of jabbering, teeth-chattering and increasingly high-pitched and delirious vocals reminiscent of the Brechtian singer, Henry Cow and Kevin Coyne collaborator Dagmar Krause.
Cast as a reprise or iteration of sorts, ‘Nearly Turbulent’ bears pitched-down vocals over scraped and buffeted bass, with a faintly liturgical air and a loose elastic breakdown which plays out like an intermission, practice session or some other disjunction in the plainchant as a vagary of clouds steadily slot into place overhead. By contrast ‘A Rolling Wave of Everything’ bursts into life and takes shape through Yahalom’s post-punk guitar line, which cuts across whinnying strings and clattering, windswept porch percussion. Cansu Tanrıkulu then begins to recite some quasi-didactic and quasi-poetic rumination on the nature of public speaking, repeating the word ‘disintegrate’ as the piece craters to a long and boisterous, hyperbolic, megaphone-clad and distorted climax.
In lowercase the titular ‘colla voce’ closes the album, whose gargling and burbling becomes a stalled revving then a sub-literate aria, sung with only sibilants and vowels plus the odd blown raspberry or clucking sound. Dunston’s creeping pizzicato bass is subsumed by a portentous, horror movie drone and the dripping exhaust of vocals which sputter out into a whisper or hiss as all of those motley strings take a single tone, throbbing away in the near darkness, out of which emerges one final soaring bastion voice, an Evangelion or Angelus.
