On what he describes 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. With 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 providing the accompaniment and the JACK Quartet comprising the violins of Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, the viola of John Richards and Jay Campbell on cello in Dunston’s own words ‘exponentially multiplying resonance and mass’, the Brooklyn composer 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 every 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 strings sometimes crisply articulated steadily congeal into fraying and ominous drones, a fledgeling tornado which starts kicking up dust with a rasping sound as it gusts and swirls.
‘Ova’churr’ opens with a babble of noise and throaty distortions, with choral interludes punctuating the short fuse of the track before an oscillating wave of voices flare 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 members of the ensemble joining one another in a radioactive murk pulled out only through the persistence of the now slowly developing bass line. An increasingly breathless voice emerges on the shore like a Mary Henry from Carnival of Souls, winded or overtaken by shock and incapable of recapitulating what they’ve 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 become a low arc amid short peals of violin, viola and cello, like an alien hand jabbing away at the string section. The bass carries its queasy tone almost to the midpoint of the track before arching with a slow stirring of life from the strings 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, lighthouse foghorns and beacons which have briefly surveyed the coast before turning inland and fixing their sights away from the sea. ‘Fully Turbulent’ exacerbates some of the underlying anxiety and menace of the previous track, with treated strings and electronic processing sounding 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, breathy chuntering, mewing and mawing with the sickly sideburned visage of the Lady in the Radiator and siren alarms. Belying its academic billing, ‘Anglo-Adjacent Phonetic Approximations’ moves from throaty crackling to choral swoons to yodelling and 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 to 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.
