Ekmeles: We Live the Opposite Daring

Whereas another vocal ensemble might channel its collective energy into a seasonal programme of Yuletide chestnuts, Ekmeles dives headlong into obscure classics of the historical avant-garde and radical new works rooted in alternative tuning systems and innovative vocal techniques. These microtonal specialists have delivered world premieres of works by John Luther Adams, Taylor Brook, Ann Cleare, Christopher Trapani, and others and recently saw their efforts recognized with the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation's 2023 Ensemble Prize, the first American group to be so honoured.

Enthusiastic collaborators, the vocal sextet—soprano Charlotte Mundy, mezzo-soprano Elisa Sutherland, countertenor Timothy Parsons, tenor Tomás Cruz, baritone (and artistic director) Jeffrey Gavett, and bass Steven Hrycelak—has partnered with equally forward-thinking groups such as Talea Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, New Chamber Ballet, and loadbang in presentations of pieces by Wolfgang Rihm, Luigi Nono, and David Lang. On We Live the Opposite Daring, Ekmeles' follow-up to its head-turning 2020 debut A howl, that was also a prayer, the group turns its attention to new material by Zosha Di Castri, James Weeks, Hannah Kendall, Shawn Jaeger, Erin Gee, and Gavett.

Much of it's demanding, to be sure, but Ekmeles more than meets the challenge. No work better illustrates the high level of difficulty involved than Weeks's Primo Libro, whose sixteen concise madrigals requires the group to painstakingly sing in thirty-one-division equal temperament. While it feels related to quarter-comma meantone, a temperament commonly used in the Renaissance and early Baroque periods, the micro-divisions separating the thirty-one intervals (which means all notes are approximately 1/5th of a tone apart) give the work a decidedly modern feel. At the same time, the scoring of these madrigals for one, two, three, and four voices strengthens that connection to an earlier time. The microtonal pitches that emerge over the course of the eighteen-minute performance are naturally riveting when so many are unfamiliar, and hearing the singers' voices spiral through the work is at times vertigo-inducing.

The five other settings are no less arresting, each one imaginatively conceived and captivating to hear. In reimagining Sappho's ancient Greek poetry through a modern lens, Di Castri's We live the opposite daring also couples new and old. The first movement begins the work with the singers slapping their thighs in a steady triple-metre rhythm as they sing, their voices at certain moments gathering into resonant chords and elsewhere splintering into whoops, smears, and glissandi. The second movement takes experimentation to a further extreme when animalistic utterances, growls, hisses, and other cryptic vocalizations surface. Movement three charges into position with body percussion and a cartwheeling voice effect igniting an explosive array of declamations and chords. Soothing by comparison is the contemplative, chorale-like closing movement, a satisfying choice arriving as it does after the furious pace of the penultimate one.

Kendall describes this is but an oration of loss as a reimagining of “the songs, cries, lamentations, incantations, and sighs” of M. NourbeSe Philip's book-length poem “Zong!,” itself a reworking of a legal transcript detailing the drowning of 130 enslaved Africans thrown off a British slave ship in 1783. The ear's instantly caught by an introduction of softly wheezing harmonicas, which gradually shifts to a blossoming of vocal harmonies and furiously whispered fragments. References to the horrific event surface through the vocal haze, with words flickering across a dense array of harmonicas and voices. Meanwhile, the text for Jaeger's playful meditation love is comprises near-rhymes and anagrams derived from a text by feminist scholar bell hooks that explores the challenges associated with the word. The hypnotic interweaving of overlapping vocal lines and spoken phrases makes for a gripping, oft-ecstatic tapestry.

The three-part Waves was written by Gavett for a performance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art using Oliver Beer's Vessel Orchestra, an instrument assembled from hollow objects in the Met's collection capable of producing a chromatic scale. Activated through feedback using individual microphones, Gavett controlled the instrument from a keyboard and sang as he played. The timbres that resulted prompted him to compose Waves as a series of beating patterns of glissandi and “almost-unisons.” In place of the no-longer-existing Vessel Orchestra, he used pre-existing samples of Ekmeles' voices to generate the dazzling panorama. Concluding the album is Gee's four-part Mouthpiece 36, which she created using 150 improvised vocal sounds as source material. Amazingly, the composer adds to the already staggering wealth of vocal effects already heard in the other works when whistles, clicks, whispers, neighs, and pops work their way into the presentation, the work's second and fourth movements particularly amazing in that regard.

A howl, that was also a prayer set a very high bar, but We Live the Opposite Daring is a more than credible follow-up. It also would be hard to imagine any other recording matching it for the sheer number of vocal effects and techniques it features. On its beguiling sophomore effort, this ever-intrepid outfit goes places few other vocal ensembles dare venture.

— Ron Schepper, 2.09.2024

The avant-garde chamber choir Ekmeles has just six members, but can attack the sound front like an army. They kick off their second release with a sonic ambush, showing off their skill with microtones and nontraditional tunings in Primo Libre by James Weeks.

Why Settle for 12 Tones?

This 17-minute tour-de-force is a set of 16 modern "madrigals" written in 31-division equal temperament (31-ET). That scale dates back to the mid-16th century but is rarely (to say the least) heard today. The tuning divides the octave not into the common 12 tones but 31 evenly spaced frequencies. It allows for chords and intervals that sound very weird and "out of tune" to our modern ears, accustomed to the 12-tone scale. An example that a non-musician can imagine is a neutral triad – a three-note chord that sits in between a major and a minor, sounding a little like each but not quite like either one.

It's not hard to play microtones (tones in between two of the typical 12) on a fretless string instrument like a violin. It's not hard to detune a guitar or piano to sound like a keyboard might have sounded before J.S. Bach popularized the well-tempered tuning (or to just sound eerie). Singing in an alternate tuning is another matter. A vocalist must cast off their intonation training to teach their vocal apparatus entirely new notes and intervals, then sing them consistently, correctly, and in harmony with others.

That's what you'll hear in the Primo Libre madrigals, written for one, two, or four voices. The ensemble's name, Ekmeles, according to its website, means, "in Ancient Greek music theory, tones of indefinite pitch and intervals with complex ratios, tones 'not appropriate for musical usage.'" But the group shows that what may seem "indefinite" actually has distinct meaning, with intriguing effects on the human ear and brain.

Ekmeles: Back to the Future

These shiny little pieces may be settings of 16th-century Italian lyrics, but they sound both alien and mechanistic, as if created by an advanced and robotically inclined otherworldly civilization. Weeks' score lets us hear solo and duo voices, where the "unnatural" intervals are plain to hear. We also hear sequences of four-part chords where individual parts move to adjacent microtones, altering the character of the chord in ways for which words don't come easily to mind because these chords don't trigger the specific emotions our brains have trained us to feel from music.

So yes, the piece shouts "I'm demonstrating something" more than "I'm seeking to make you feel something." But it can certainly make you feel that you've experienced something new.

The four-movement title piece is a new work by Zosha Di Castri setting fragments of poems by Sappho. Glissandos, ululations, sprechstimme, body percussion, and other effects elaborate a creepy sound palette that's twisted and dynamic. Unapologetically weird, this music outlines a strange psychedelic journey from ancient Greece to an uncertain and scary future.

Airy harmonicas in gently clashing tunings usher in this is but an oration of loss by Hannah Kendall. This Ekmeles commission sets an M. NourbeSe Philip text about a 1730 legal case concerning the deliberate drowning of 130 enslaved Africans. Aesthetically the most powerful piece on the album, it's a melange of lamentations including shouts, cries, mournful vocal harmonies and dissonances, and anxious spoken readings.

Shawn Jaeger's love is features intriguing microtonal harmonies and humorous spoken-word interjections. It also shows off the vocal skills of individual singers. But overall it smacks of quirkiness for the sake of quirkiness.

Cut and Paste

The album closes with two studio efforts. The first, Waves, has three short movements created by Ekmeles' artistic director and baritone Jeffrey Gavett. The piece is a vocal realization of music originally performed on artist Oliver Bear's "vessel orchestra" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gavett's stitched-together vocal samples add up to compelling vocalise: introspective sighing; assertive chanting; then a haunting darkness with an inconclusive resolution.

For the four short segments of "Mouthpiece 36," Erin Gee employs recordings of the singers scatting, humming, growling, swooping in glissandos, whistling, going nasal, articulating nonsense syllables, and even indulging in rich, natural-sounding harmonizing. Enough of the sounds resemble animal utterances that their having being "improvised in nature spaces" rings true. These are curious and funny little pieces that don't seem to take themselves too seriously, even if the composer's liner notes do.

All told, We Live the Opposite Daring cements Ekmeles as one of our foremost experimental vocal ensembles. The album comes out February 16, 2024 on New Focus Recordings. I can't wait to hear what they record next.

Their February and March 2024 concerts take place in New York City and include performances of music by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Arvo Pärt. Hannah Kendall's piece from this album is on the menu for a free concert March 23 at St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University.

— Jon Sobel, 2.09.2024

https://www.wruu.org/broadcasts/48941

— Dave Lake, 2.26.2024

New York’s Ekmeles are one of the most probing and experimental vocal ensembles in the US, a compact group with an outsized mastery of both ancient and modern approaches. They delve into the past on opening gem Primo Libro by British composer James Weeks, the director of Exaudi—which often feels like a sister ensemble to Ekmeles. Weeks created an uninterrupted collection of 16 brief madrigals—in solos, duos, trios, and quartets—written using a 31-tone scale once common in the Baroque era, placing meticulous demands on each singer. The ensemble nails it, taking us back in time while also suggesting something futuristic, with forms and lyrics eluding any clear reference. Zosha di Castri’s title work also collects ancient ideas, recasting texts by Greek poet Sappho and borrowing folk traditions in a three-movement piece that incorporates mouth percussion and other extended techniques from the vocalists. Hannah Kendall’s this is but an oration of loss takes material from a poem by M. NourbeSe Philip recounting the brutal story of 130 enslaved Africans that were drowned in 1783, thrown off of a British slave ship; the piece blends rustic harmonica, narrative fragments, onomatopoetic utterances, and swooping harmonies to create a haunting, troubling resonance. Additional pieces by Shawn Jaeger, ensemble member Jeffrey Gavett, and Erin Gee vividly inspire yet further stylistic excursions, all executed with unerring intonation, dramatic flair, and rhythmic vitality, thriving within and outside choral orthodoxy.

— Peter Margasak, 2.29.2024

We Live the Opposite Daring, the sophomore album from the New York-based vocal sextet Ekmeles, is immediately magnificent. Released Feb. 16 on New Focus Recordings, the album is a tour de force in contemporary vocal music, featuring a massive variety of techniques, approaches, and styles, while never losing sight of its expressive power in these technical pursuits.

The album opens with James Weeks’ Primo Libro, a series of 18 continuous madrigals for one, two, or four voices, cast in 31-tone equal temperament. This tuning system means that each neighboring tone is approximately one-fifth of a whole-step apart, as opposed to the half-steps used in most Western music. This allows for much finer control of intervals and lines, as well as more ‘pure’ harmonies that closely match simple ratio relationships. But it also requires incredible skill from the performers in producing these extremely precise intervals. Luckily, Ekmeles is up to the task, bringing this work vividly to life. Every detail is immaculately rendered, creating vibrant, resonant harmonies that dazzlingly shift and slide about in this incredible work.

Based on texts by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, Zosha Di Castri’s We live the opposite daring begins simply with body percussion and slowly stacking harmonies before rapidly expanding out into a dense kaleidoscope of semi-independent voices. Di Castri uses a downward slide as a primary motif in the first two movements, building into a powerful climax that gradually sighs away. Ekmeles’ performance of the sensitive final movement, which highlights the lyrical qualities of Sappho’s poetry, is particularly stirring; they sing the subtle and deceptively complex music breathtakingly, with absolute grace and poise.

Hannah Kendall’s this is but an oration of loss begins with a dissonant array of harmonicas that saturate the audio spectrum, creating a dense curtain of sound through which voices slowly emerge: fragmented, spoken, whispered, and sung. The piece reconfigures text from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, a book-length poem about the drowning of 130 enslaved Africans, thrown off the British slave ship Zong in the Caribbean in 1781. The piece is tense, anxious, and dense throughout, struck through with an air of lamentation that conveys the seriousness and tragic horror of its subject.

Meanwhile, Shawn Jaeger’s love is evokes Ligeti with disjointed, rhythmic singing and extensive use of distinct vocal timbres that remind me of the Nonsense Madrigals. This setting of text by American feminist author bell hooks also includes significant spoken passages, which are handled as readily and expressively by the ensemble members as their sung work. In particular, the solos midway through the work are both extremely difficult and extremely well executed, with the transitions between spoken and sung tones handled convincingly by each singer. Eventually, Jaeger builds to a powerful climax that breaks out into wild melismas, foreshadowed by the repetition of “crashing” and “smashing” earlier in the work.

Jeffrey Gavett originally wrote Waves for voices and Oliver Beer’s Vessel Orchestra, which was a sound installation that used microphone feedback in hollow objects to create resonance. Vessel Orchestra no longer exists, so Gavett repurposed the piece using recorded samples of Ekmeles’ singing to explore near unisons that produce the auditory effect of beating. The result is strikingly otherworldly, as voices move, jump, and interact in ways that feel simultaneously human and inhuman.

The final work, Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece 36, features the widest variety of vocal effects, running a vast gambit of clicks, whistles, breaths, fricatives, and more things than can be named. To generate material, Gee recorded and cataloged 150 improvised vocal sounds that became the source for the work. Despite this outward strangeness, the piece is immediately approachable with interesting, and at times even groovy, rhythmic schemes and expertly crafted harmonies that keep the piece grounded. Each of the movements shares materials and ideas, but remains distinct, helping the work maintain a sense of freshness throughout. The final movement is particularly excellent, with Gee using extended vocal techniques in the context of a slowly developing choral setting. Ekmeles is at their finest here, demonstrating their mastery of both traditional and experimental vocal styles and creating a wonderfully intriguing and moving vocal texture.

— Sofia Rocha, 3.14.2024

I’m not going to mislead you, this one may not be for everyone. It’s not “easy listening” – but it is very rewarding listening, an intense experience that dives deep and is deeply satisfying. Ekmeles (taking their name from an ancient Greek technical musical term for “tones not appropriate for musical usage”) are a New York based group of singers who dedicate themselves to new and neglected older avant-garde music. Very much like the British group EXAUDI, who I have reviewed in this column, Ekmeles are a hyper-virtuosic ensemble who can tackle the most challenging music in a way that doesn’t just get the notes right – although they do that for sure – but also breathes life into it, giving performances that are committed, colourful and highly arresting. This, their second album, has incredible breadth, from Hannah Kendall’s searingly angry and elegiac this is but an oration of loss, about the drowning of 130 enslaved Africans at the hands of British sailors in 1783, to the rocking minimalism of Shawn Jaeger’s love is and Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece sequence, which shares a joy in extended vocal techniques that reminded me of Roomful of Teeth.

There is a direct connection with EXAUDI in the form of the opening work, Primo Libro by James Weeks, EXAUDI’s founder-director. This 17-minute collection of 16 short madrigals (all recorded as one track) uses a 31-division equal temperament tuning, which means that its many chordal consonances are super-consonant, with thirds so pure they could get married in a white dress. In between these gleaming chordal moments, microtonal melodies weave their way through fragile solos and duets. Zosh Di Castri’s We live the opposite daring offers rhythmic impetus, through body percussion and exhilarating fast syllabic nonsense. Jeffrey Gavett is the artistic director of Ekmeles and his Waves is a vocal realisation of a piece originally written for an instrument in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The wordless music has long notes coming in and out of tune with each other and it is like listening to a Mark Rothko colour study. The singers make an impassioned case for the music they are singing: they really believe in it, and they made me believe too. It’s not one to put on in the background, but it deserves – and will repay – concentrated listening.

— Bernard Hughes, 6.08.2024

Fans of this vocal ensemble - and I am one - have had to wait since 2020 for a follow-up to their deliriously good debut album but this rich feast provides enough sustenance for another lengthy hiatus. Featuring works by six composers, including Zosha Di Castri, with whom they’ve worked at least since 2019, Hannah Kendall, Shawn Jaeger, James Weeks, Erin Gee, and Ekmeles director Jeffrey Gavett, We Live… presents a slide show of wildly different approaches. From Weeks’ Primo Libro, which opens the album on a stern note, to Gee’s Mouthpiece 36, which ends things playfully, Ekmeles dazzles once again with their fearlessness, feeling, and expertise.

— Jeremy Shatan, 6.30.2024

The small vocal ensemble Ekmeles cheekily takes its name from a term in ancient Greek music theory, meaning "tones inappropriate for musical use." Most of the sounds still fit that description, but Ekmeles executes them with consummate musicality. A substantial part of Ekmeles' work here was done before any recording equipment was turned on; the group chose a truly striking collection of new pieces, some of them newly commissioned, all of them different, all of them extremely demanding technically, and all of them hanging together well as a group. As for the execution, samplers can plunge in immediately with the first track, the Primo Libro of James Weeks. As the title suggests, these are madrigals, 17 of them, sung without a pause for various numbers of voices. The piece is written in 31-Division Equal Temperament, a tuning proposed by the Renaissance theorist Nicolà Vicentino that results in especially brilliant thirds, both major and minor. These are exploited by the composer, and needless to say, they require iron intonational control from the singers. Elsewhere on the program are other extended techniques. Zosha Di Castri's title work sets poems by Sappho and includes body percussion and vocal glissandi, while Hannah Kendall's this is but an oration of loss mixes music and speech in a memorial to Africans killed on a slave transport ship. Body percussion recurs in Erin Gee's four-movement Mouthpiece 36, while Shawn Jaeger's love is, to a text by bell hooks, explores sharply shifting wide and close intervals. Jeffrey Gavett's Waves uses an instrument at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oliver Beer's Vessel Orchestra, that no longer exists. The entire performance is a high-wire act, and it is splendidly recorded, often with the composers themselves as producers, at suburban New York's Oktaven Audio; one has the feeling that care was taken at every turn. A marvelous release for fans of contemporary vocal music and even for those who say they don't like contemporary music.

— James Manheim, 4.01.2024

One of the most amazing choral discs to have come my way: a crack vocal ensemble presenting vitally alive music of our time. The program begins with an intentionally “primal” setting by James Weeks of madrigal texts—or, as the attribution puts it, “Petrarchistic texts used by Jacques Arcadelt in his Primo Libro de’ Madrigali (1539).” Composed between 2012 and 2016, this is a remarkable piece. We are a long way from Arcadelt, though, although Weeks certainly refers to tropes used in historic madrigal settings. In this sequence of 16 madrigals, presented as one track, Weeks also asks for the 31-division equal temperament of Nicola Vincentino (1511–1575/6), whose system is closely related to quarter-comma meantone; in this, nearly all major and minor triads can be rendered “near-justly.” Also, fifth-tone pitches are utilized, resulting in the most amazing soundscape. One can only guess how difficult this is to perform accurately, and all credit is due to Ekmeles for its efforts. One can hear real colors as a result of this tuning, with consonances taking on vitality as well as providing arrival points. The confidence of Ekmeles’ pitching ensures that one hears these micro-divisions of pitch as real pitches and, in combinations, new harmonies, and not just as slips and slides within or around the conventional semitone. It is also amazing how quickly the ear adjusts; whether heard in harmony or within the context of an individual unaccompanied line (as at the end via Charlotte Mundy’s clarion soprano), the members of Ekmeles perform as if they had been singing in 31-division equal temperament their whole lives. Most importantly, this piece and this performance might just cause listeners to question the long-standing ideas held about exactly what music is within the Western tradition and how it can be successfully extended. And make no mistake, James Weeks’s piece is successful. I find myself, therefore, parting company in no small way with my colleague David Deboor Canfield, who has reviewed the two previous releases of Weeks’s music in the Fanfare Archive (Fanfare 40:3 and 37:2). My own review of Weeks’s Métier disc (the one in 40:3), I hope, provides an alternative viewpoint, and my positive impressions then are more than borne out by the extravagance of imagination exuded by Primo Libro now.

Another piece with a highly individual sound world is Zosha Di Castri’s We live the opposite daring (2023), from which the disc takes its name. My colleague Robert Carl welcomed the only other example of Di Castri’s music in the Fanfare Archive, The Dream Feed, on a disc entitled I. A. M. on New World Records (Fanfare 46:4). Here it is Sappho that is the inspiration, and the work forms a part of a broader project in which Di Castri writes a piece for Ekmeles once a decade, to see how voices (and dynamics) change over time. In that sense, each piece is a “time capsule” (the first was the 2013 piece, The Animal After Whom All Other Animals Are Named). Using translations by Anne Carson, from If Not, Winter: Fragments from Sappho, Di Castri celebrates the patchwork nature of Sappho’s writings, the “holes” that literally appear in papyrus and rob us of whole linguistic statements. There are four movements, the first two overtly beautiful, the third of high velocity and full of extraneous sounds and wordless gestures. Vocal virtuosity is the order of the day here, caught in a present, close, and analytical recording, the voices carefully and aptly spaced. Texts are given in English and Greek (but not transliterated Greek). The sheer fragile beauty of the final fragment is remarkable, as is the control the vocalists need (and deliver) to bring this to life is remarkable.

Amazingly, there is only one song by Hannah Kendall in the Archive (Fanfare 48:4); I was lucky enough to be present at the Ivors award ceremony on London’s Southbank earlier this year, when Kendall won Best Large Ensemble Composition for her quarter-hour Shouting Forever Into The Receiver for 17 players (a performance of that piece for the 2022 Donaueschinger Musiktage exists on YouTube, for the curious). The piece on the present disc is this is but an oration of loss from 2022. Both pieces exude a fascination with timbre, and with sound itself. Linked to a quote from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel (“Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain so that they might live”), Shouting Forever into the Receiver is also a reimagination of M. NourbeSe Philip’s book-length poem Zong!, which is itself a reworking of a legal transcript concerning the drowning of 130 enslaved Africans on a British ship that sank en route to Jamaica. Choir members have to play harmonicas, an instrument according to the composer “associated with Afro-disaporic sorrow.” Small wind-up music boxes hauntingly tinkle out melodies associated with the sea, a remarkable sound associated surely with innocence and infanthood. This is a masterful piece; Kendall is a major voice in composition at the moment, and one fervently hopes for more of her music to make it to the catalog, and onward to the pages of Fanfare.

There is quite the shift to Shawn Jaeger’s Love Is, which takes a text by feminist scholar bell hooks and has a lot of fun with it, both in terms of the manipulation of that text and in the musical realization, all the while asking the six-million-dollar question of what is, after all is said and done, love? The singers of Ekmeles sing with much zeal; the recording supports their endeavors beautifully, with each voice precisely placed.

Another composer appearing only for the second time in the Fanfare Archive is Jeffrey Gavett, whose Waves (2019–22) is a triptych. Gavett is both a composer and the artistic director of Ekmeles, and this piece comprises samples from a performance of Christopher Trapani’s End Words. It was originally composed for artist Oliver Beer’s vessel orchestra, made up of various hollow instruments from the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, and brought into life via feedback from microphones, themselves activated via a keyboard. The piece explores near-unisons and the “beating” effect they produce; the transferal to voices is expertly managed. Again, the vocal virtuosity from Ekmeles is beyond criticism, although I personally found Gavett’s piece interesting as opposed to emotionally involving.

Finally, there comes Erin Gee’s 2021 composition Mouthpiece 36, its musical surface derived from 150 source sound files, all improvised, mostly outside and in response to the natural dialog between fauna and its ecosystem. Part One (of four) deals with higher altitudes; the second part offers something of a modern, jazzy homage to the madrigal and prefigures the fourth movement, “where grit and nasality meet,” as the composer puts it. Referencing e. e. cummings via the statement “The rain has small enough hands to hold each sound,” this third movement lasts only 15 seconds. The finale, an appreciation by the composer of “minutiae in Nature,” is particularly transfixing; but ultimately it is the Weeks and the Kendall pieces that linger strongest in the memory.

This is a phenomenal disc, brilliantly and often beautifully performed by Ekmeles and recorded to the very highest of standards. Unhesitatingly recommended, and a real Want List contender.

— Colin Clarke, 5.29.2024

The Ekmeles vocal ensemble, spearheaded by the director Jeffrey Gavett, bring their distinct vocal prowess to these new works by Zosha Di Castri, James Weeks, Hannah Kendall, Shawn Jaeger and Erin Gee.

Weeks’ Primo Libro starts the listen with fluid voices harmonizing amid much warmth and grace, where Gavett’s baritone is especially noteworthy, and We live the opposite daring, by Di Castri, follows with Charlotte Mundy’s glowing soprano surrounded by the layered voices that create much atmosphere.

Kendall’s this is but an oration of loss arrives in the middle, and presents a unique minimalism that involves both whispered and spoken moments of harmonic gestures, while love is offers spoke and sung voices that overlap and build into a powerful conclusion for the Jaeger piece.

Gavett’s Waves resides near the end, and blends Elisa Sutherland’s mezzo-soprano, Timothy Parsons’ countertenor and Tomás Cruz’s tenor with much attention to mood in the 3 wordless segments, and Gee’s Mouthpiece exits with influence from electronic music, and explores nasal, whistling, breath and plenty of other improvised vocal sounds via the clever finish.

A body of work that takes timbre, pitch and microtonality into careful consideration, Ekmeles flesh out a fascinating and atypical a capella affair.

— Tom Haugen, 10.19.2024