Comprised of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, countertenor, tenor, baritone (who also conducts them), and bass, Ekmeles is a New York-based vocal sextet devoted to new classical music. Their most obvious antecedent is Electric Phoenix, whose members in turn came from Ward Swingle’s Swingle II. Ekmeles is the Greek word for tones “not appropriate for musical usage,” so it should come as no surprise that this new ensemble seems to gravitate toward the odd, the experimental, and the opposite of “easy listening.” This is their debut release, although I think individual tracks by Ekmeles have been included on other releases.
When reviewing new music releases, I usually start by writing about the music itself. This time, however, it seems appropriate to say from the outset that, while you might not like the music on this CD, there should be little doubt that these performances are absolutely astonishing. In all three of these works, one suspects that Ekmeles has been assimilated by The Borg (attention Star Trek fans!) because they sing as if they were one being with one brain and six mouths. That is how perfect their tuning and their synchrony are. These works, especially the first, also give them opportunities to act with their voices, and this too is carried out with skill and sensitivity.
Taylor Brook’s Motorman Sextet is based on David Ohle’s cult novel Motorman. Stylistically, the novel reads like a sci-fi hybrid of The Metamorphosis and Woyzeck as it might have been penned by William S. Burroughs. The central character, Moldenke, dwells in a decaying future in which multiple moons and suns light up the polluted sky. Moldenke is kept alive by four sheep hearts that pump blood through his body. It does not get less strange. Brook took his text from 10 of Ohle’s chapters, although he shuffles their order, which makes the story neither less nor more perplexing. Each member of the sextet recites sections of the text, while the others comment on it or illustrate it with swoops, grunts, gurgles, and just about any noise that can come out of a human throat. The last section (which starts with the words “In the old days Moldenke listened to the weatherman, his radio on through the short nights, the face of it green and glowing”) starts with what sounds like half-remembered and half-misheard recollections of a country-and-western song, so there is humor too, although it is of the blacker sort. Motorman Sextet contains much that is similarly funny and horrifying, all at the same time. It sounds like a synthesis of Berio (A-Ronne, perhaps) and Ligeti with one of Robert Ashley’s contemporary operas. Brook is a composer to keep one’s eye on. For example, Virtutes occultae, a work for six alternatively tuned virtual pianos, is available on Bandcamp.com, and it is an ear-bender in its own way.
Next up is a selection of three scenes from Erin Gee’s opera Sleep, “with texts compiled from Vedic scriptures, the myth analyses of Joseph Campbell, and Robinson Jeffers.” However, it is unlikely that you will discern any words at all. Elsewhere, writing about her related series of so-called Mouthpieces, Gee has commented that she “notate[s] the vocal sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in order to accurately transcribe both the type of sound and the place of articulation in the mouth. The sounds that I use are often remnants or artifacts of phonemes, however, when placed in a non-semantic context, they float in a liminal space with no overt connection to a language.” Suffice it to say that these three excerpts, totaling just over 10 minutes, take us into a realm in which nothing seems familiar, but which nevertheless seems to be governed by logic, as foreign as that logic might seem. In addition to singing (after a fashion), there are whistles, lip-popping, and other sounds that seem related to what some popular performers of today refer to as “beatboxing,” which essentially is the art of imitating percussion instruments with the voice alone.
Christopher Trapani’s End Words is a collection of sestinas, defined by Wikipedia as “a fixed verse form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, normally followed by a three-line envoi. The words that end each line of the first stanza are used as line endings in each of the following stanzas, rotated in a set pattern.” Specifically, the verses are Anis Mojgani’s They Raised Violins, Ciara Shuttleworth’s Sestina, and John Ashbery’s The Painter. In the booklet, Trapani’s description of the work is itself a sestina—very creative! And even more creatively, Trapani has attempted to mirror (in different ways) the structure of the sestinas with his musical settings. End Words is unlike the other works on this disc in two ways: It adds other sounds (birdsong, telephones, and many that are less easy to identify or describe) and, in performance, some of the singing is pre-recorded. Trapani does not fragment or shuffle the texts, so it is possible to follow them, although the layering and manipulation of sounds can make this difficult, so it is good that New Focus Recordings has provided them in the booklet. Trapani’s music, like Brook’s suggests Berio, Ashley, and Ligeti—imagine, if you will, the latter’s Mysteries of the Macabre cross-pollinated with musique concrète). End Words, like Motorman Sextet and Sleep, is heavily involuted, and it demands a lot from the listener (not least his or her closest attention, and a willingness to go with its unpredictable and unusual flow), but it certainly is impressive, and, despite the antecedents I listed above, original in the degree to which Trapani explores the consequences of his compositional choices.
This disc, which goes by the title A Howl, That Was Also A Prayer is a strange kind of fun, but fun nonetheless. All three composers take us to new and not always comfortable places, but never simply to shock us, and the performances by Ekmeles are beyond expert—almost frightening in their precision. If you have read this far, perhaps this is for you.