This is an avante-garde album featuring Song Circus, an a capella vocal sextet from Norway. The works they are performing on the album include Landscape with Figures, which was developed with its composer, Ruben Sverre Gjertsen, over a 4 year period and Ole-Henrik Moe’s Persefone.

The human voice is a central part of the instrumental palette of this project and much of the music is the result of the joint efforts of the ensemble and the composer. Landscapes with Figures is partially open in its form; the music is tremendously detailed and intricately notated and requires considerable musical and vocal technique and virtuosity. The composition stretches the limits of tonal flexibility and microtonal precision. Landscape with Figures IIa is composed for performance with eight or sixteen sound channels. As part of the process, Gjertsen studied the academic work of Wishart and Ferneyhoug, and their systems of notation and compositions.

Ole-Henrik Moe’s Persefone is an acoustic piece written for five female voices and wine glasses. It is a textural study of vocal sound, dynamics and microtonality. Moe took inspiration from Morton Feldman when he wrote Persefone and, in the first part, he stretches silence and slowness so far that any sense of a horizontal timeline dissolves into a music of state.

Song Circus
Stine Janvin Motland
Maria Norseth Garli
Liv Runesdatter
Anita Kaasbøll
Eva Bjerga Haugen
Rønnaug Bakke

Artistic Director: Liv Runesdatter
Batonist: Jonas Skartveit Rogne
Electronics: Ruben Sverre Gjertsen
Batonist, Persefone: Carl Anders Nilsen

The post Anatomy Of Sound appeared first on NativeDSD Music.