Hasco Duo: The Same Old Wonder

Nothing about the Hasco Duo's new disc, “The Same Old Wonder" (New Focus Recordings), appears to fit the title, at least on the surface, as it contains works that are entirely new and unexpected. Comprised of soprano Amanda de Boer Bartlett and guitarist Jesse Langen, this duo (whose name is an anagram of the word “chaos”) has set out to “…deconstruc[t] the conventional expectations associated with a voice and guitar duo” – a goal they’ve most certainly achieved. On The Same Old Wonder, Bartlett and Langen debut five new works by Ravi Kittappa, Morgan Krauss, Luis Fernando Amaya, Jonathon Sokol, and the performers themselves. One note: there was limited biographical information in the album booklet about the performers, and none for the composers. Perhaps this information could be added, at least in a digital format.

Ravi Kitappa's Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst… takes a quote from Friedrich Nietzche’s Beyond Good and Evil that reads, “When one stares into the abyss, the abyss also stares back.” Kittappa sets a flowingly melodic vocalise over throbbing guitar riffs, creating waves of sound that burst forward and then recede, the abyss personified. Bartlett and Langen move in a completely different direction with their own composition, Wildflower. The folk-like melody, sung a cappella, could be an attractive tune on its own, capturing the childlike essence of the words of Constantinos Harpending Pavellas. Bartlett’s clear voice is particularly effective in capturing the wonder and inquisitive nature of the young poet. Langen’s gentle and sustained playing provides a shimmery canvas for the text.

Morgan Krauss' pallid tongues opens with a stream of distorted, punchy text recited over dense riffs, the rhythms vying for prominence. Memories–about making love, confusion, and feelings of flight, all jumbled together–are recalled and pushed aside. The struggle stops for a moment, as the singer reflects, “Sometimes we have to avoid thinking about the problems life presents. Otherwise we’d suffocate. Banality is sometimes striking.” From then on, her words begin to gradually fall apart into syllables. The guitar ceases its rhythmic drive and begins to envelop the voice as it deconstructs.

Tinta Roja/Tinta Negra (Red Ink/Black Ink) by Luis Fernando Amaya is an especially compelling work. Tinta Roja/Tinta Negra is an homage to “ancient voices, silenced and lost to perpetuity.” The interplay of the guitar with ebow and the voice create a resonant and captivating 13-minute soundscape that is at first formless and sustained. The sounds begin to shift upwards in pitch and novel textures, and colors appear as the ear strains to hear the singer’s “cries” emerging from the fabric of the work. These vocalizations and the accompanying interjections from the guitar grow louder and more intense until they fade away; the ancient voices exiting from the first.

Jonathan Sokol's Basic Lands is the final work; a 25-minute modular game piece with texts taken from the book The Prairie and the Sea by William Quayle. The rules of the composition are modeled after the card game “Magic: The Gathering” and include a variable and stratospheric vocal part (performed exuberantly with perfect pitch and diction by Bartlett) and a guitar part that must be improvised based on chance selection of fragmented musical gestures. Langen’s performance is exemplary here. His fluid rendering of the various gestures in dialogue with the voice is outstanding. Too often overlooked, the engineering team led by Alex Inglizian and Jack Murray (whose masterful work is clearly noted throughout the disc) deserves special kudos for the balance and clarity of the musical lines. The voice is never overpowered, as it easily could have been, by the guitar in even the most intense sections, and yet nothing feels dull or restrained. A masterful and resoundingly successful effort.

“The Same Old Wonder” sets an entirely new bar for what is possible by a voice and guitar duo. It is an unexpected, captivating, and somewhat experimental journey through a variety of intensely captivating sound worlds. I am looking forward to further surprises and innovations from this talented pair.

— Lauren Alfano, 4.16.2020

On the evidence of this, their third album, the Hasco Duo — soprano Amanda DeBoer Bartlett and guitarist Jesse Langen — bring a new perspective to the art song. At its most compelling, their collective sound is a play of opposites—of DeBoer’s clear, intimately human voice against the technologically facilitated distortion Langen brings to his guitar sound. This opposition, and the aesthetic and emotional tensions it both creates and balances, is epitomized in the duo’s performance on the 25-minute-long Basic Lands by Jonathan Sokol. The vocal part, a dramatic bit of register-leaping virtuosity in its delivery of text drawn from William Quayle’s The Prairie and the Sea, contrasts in its natural timbres and nature imagery with the guitar’s sonically abrasive and harmonically discordant interventions.

On the duo’s setting of poet Constantinos Harpending Pavellas’ “Wildflower” DeBoer Bartlett’s voice takes on a haunting poignance as she sings the childlike—because actually written by a child—words against the lush background of sustained tones from Langen’s guitar. For Luis Fernando Amaya’s Tinta Roja, Tinta Negra/Red Ink, Black Ink, DeBoer’s shouts and cries rise and fall alongside of Langen’s long-sustained sounds. The anguish of the piece is particularly brought into focus through the microtonal clashes that result as their lines weave across and through each other.

“The Same Old Wonder” also includes Ravi Kittappa’s Nietzsche-inspired piece Und wenn du lange in eninen Abgrund blickst…, a collision of sound poetry and extended technique for electric guitar, and Morgan Krauss’ pallid tongues, a piece for urgently spoken text and industrially distorted guitar.

— Daniel Barbiero, 4.17.2020

Playfulness and experimentation with modes of narrative underpin the pieces on this disc. The cascading sounds that open California-based Ravi Kittappa’s Und wenn du lange in einem Abgrund blickst ... find soprano and electric guitar in a glorious electronic soup. The title is from Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil and finishes, “And when one stares into the abyss, the abyss stares back.” At the beginning, the electric guitar taps against the strings and the voice responds, as if communication is being established. There is something primal about Kittappa’s soundscape that seems to invite us to ask questions about the nature of being and of gestation: it comes as no real surprise to learn that Kittappa studied philosophy at Johns Hopkins University prior to completing a doctorate in music composition at University of California, Berkeley. The close microphone on the voice enables the listener to savor every last variation of timbre, from pure to grainy, just as one can get carried away by the gradations of the guitar. The virtuosity of both DeBoer Bartlett and Landan is remarkable. An invitation to explore an abyss, “possibly of our own making” as the notes point out, is one of vital importance; this is as visceral a musical response as can be imagined.

It is quite a shift to the welcoming, almost folksy sound of the Hasco Duo’s own Wildflower. As the song progresses, the guitar contribution becomes fuller, a halo that first envelops the singer later destabilizing her. To call it an interlude between the grittier pieces that surround it would be to do it a disservice; it is perfectly formed in and of itself.

A Cageian sense of recitation (not quite as unintelligible though) suffuses Morgan Krauss’s pallid tongues, heard against a powerful distorted electronic background that seems designed to destabilize emotions. Structurally this piece is simple and effective: after the cascade of words, a sudden silence elicits a straightforward statement (“Sometimes we have to avoid thinking about the problems life presents. Otherwise, we’d suffocate. Banality is sometimes striking”); a final section features broken syllables against slowly aggregated guitar chords, still grungy but now less threatening.

Not to be confused with composer Efraim Amaya, Luis Fernando Amaya is a Mexican composer and percussionist based in Chicago and pursuing a doctorate in composition at Northwestern University. His “open instrumental arrangement” (his term) Tinta roja, tinta negra (Red Ink, Black Ink) presents sounds that seem to refer to an ancient ritualism, slow and sustained as the guitar, played with an e-bow, creates pitch “beatings” against the wordless voice (the latter flawlessly pitched by DeBoer Bartlett). The piece has a floating quality, although this is no “New Age” piece; unsettling, quiet bass sounds repeatedly threaten any peace.

The longest piece on the disc is Jonathan Sokol’s Basic Lands with text from William Quayle’s The Prairie and the Sea. It is a “modular game piece” in that the rules of the musical manipulation are derived after the “Magic: The Gathering” strategy card game, so that cards drawn determine phrases in the voice and microtonal gestures in the guitar. Influenced by Chicago’s experimentalist scene, the structural staging posts are really only the very beginning and the very end, which comprise the same vocal passage. In between the guitar part consists of five “draws,” each of five gestures that the composer should improvise around. There exists a fertile creative friction between the controlled aleatorism of the guitar and the more conventionally directional, linear voice.

One can hear when care meets expertise in contemporary music; such is the case here. The performers act as one; their concentration is total. The Hasco Duo is “consciously interested in deconstructing the conventional expectations associated with a voice and guitar duo”; they have succeeded in their ambitions admirably. Any ideas of “voice and guitar” implying folk songs around a campfire can safely be jettisoned. Superbly recorded at the Experimental Sound Studio and Chicago Academy for the Arts, Illinois, this is an important release.

— Colin Clarke, 2.22.2021