Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
A debut album is always exciting. As I cover new music I very often discover new recordings from performers and composers who’ve been on the scene – some scene, anyway – for awhile, just not on my radar. No one’s radar screen is wide enough, I tell myself, to encompass all the innovative music coming out. (New Sounds‘ John Schaefer probably comes closest.) SydeBoob Duo is soprano vocalist Anna Elder and flutist Sarah Steranka. They perform and commission contemporary chamber music and are out with their first album, on New Focus Recordings.
Extended techniques form a big part of their sound. The human voice, our oldest instrument, is also a remarkably malleable one. “Composition No. 304 for Two Instruments” by celebrated composer Anthony Braxton, for example, shows off Elder’s facility with ululation, vibrato, airy pipings, and scratchy growls and other unpitched effects, not to mention throat singing with its eerie harmonics. The synched/unison writing in the early minutes launch this piece with a comforting sense of solidarity.
The fertile pairing of soprano voice and flute feels very natural (as well as “au naturel”) throughout this collection of works. Sometimes musicians create an atypical instrument combination simply because they have similar tastes or just like working together. Not so here – there’s no sense of anything forced, or absent. And if the combination might seem too high-frequency-heavy, that’s moderated by variety – and inventive playfulness, as in the last section of Max Johnson’s “Translucent Yawn” (not to mention the ensemble’s name.)
“Translucent Yawn” actually starts out with a more traditional melodic-duet sound. So does “The Frontierswomen” by Eric Moe, whose work is often very playful. His piece here grows to include leaping melodies, snapping sounds, and throat clearing, all in a setting of amusing lyrics by Mikko Harvey. For her part, Steranka somehow burps from the flute a sound almost indistinguishable from pizzicato.
Yes O Yes
Other texts are more familiar, time-weathered, and thus less interesting in themselves (James Joyce, Gertrude Stein). But with the exception of the Moe piece, the texts are largely secondary. The opening piece, “O Yes & I” by Rebecca Saunders with text from Molly Bloom’s famous monologue at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses, begins with a few bars of soft, echoey vocalizing. One can almost envision something devotional. But we haven’t gone more than 45 seconds before Elder stabs out a rolled trill that would have made Billy Stewart proud.
Cooing notes from the flute accompany the expanding vocal effects, with the combination sometimes producing microtonal dissonances. Elder pushes out individual words and brief phrases each with its own quality. Sometimes the delivery is illustrative of a specific word. But the overall effect is abstract, as of an instrumental ensemble with individual or paired instruments taking turns expressing a variety of motifs, slowly filling up a large canvas with expressionist designs.
The anxious and stichomythic “She Is There” by Ramin Akhavijou provides contrast. Steranka stutters out questioning flute figures while Elder alternates quiet spoken-word passages with declarative singing and ululating. Gertrude Stein’s deconstructed verbiage continues to inspire composers after all these decades; here they also inspire Elder to marshal a wide vocal palette.
“Invocation VI” by Beat Furrer, with text from the Cántico espiritual from 16th-century Spanish mystic Juan de la Cruz, syncs monosyllabic vocal exclamations in a wide range of pitches with percussive flute effects. The latter include Ian Anderson-style vocal peccadillos, plucking sounds that resemble a talking drum, and even a lion-like roar.
Read more about what SydeBook Duo is up to at their website. Au Naturel, their excellent debut, is out now on New Focus Recordings and available at Bandcamp.
