Alpaca Ensemble & Eirik Hegdal with Thea Ellingsen Grant: The Sky Opens Twice
Particular Recording Collective

Trondheim Voices & Eirik Hegdal: The Sound of Contemporary Living
Particular Recording Collective

It's fitting that both of these projects were issued as collaborations between the respective ensembles and Eirik Hegdal. After all, he composed the material performed by Trondheim Voices on its latest and wrote most of the material on the Alpaca Ensemble set too. Further to that, he was involved in a production capacity on both releases and is credited with saxophones, clarinet, and backing tracks on The Sky Opens Twice and drum machines, synthesizers, and backing tracks on The Sound of Contemporary Living. The artistic director of the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra from 2002 to 2017, a leader of multiple ensembles (Team Hegdal, Følk, etc.), and an associate professor at NTNU / Jazzlinja in Trondheim, Hegdal puts many of the skills he's developed as a musician, composer, and bandleader to good use on the releases.

The Sound of Contemporary Living is, however, as much a Trondheim Voices recording, especially when it's the voices of Sissel Vera Pettersen (artistic director), Kari Eskild Havenstrøm, Anita Kaasbøll, Siri Gjære, Heidi Skjerve, and Mia Marlen Berg that give the album its defining character. No other vocal ensemble sounds quite like it when the group integrates live electronics into its presentation and complements the singers' voices with electronically altered treatments. The group's experimental sensibility comes through in the material it performs, which can range from an austere acoustic piece to a luminous ambient soundscape. In operation for two decades, Trondheim Voices is as comfortable contending with a notated score as collective vocal improvisation and enhances its live performances with lighting and movement.

Having earlier collaborated with the group on the theatre production Hundre Hemmeligheter, Hegdal reunites with Trondheim Voices for a project oriented around the theme of modern life. That concept acts as a unifying thread for an album that traverses multiple stylistic zones, from electronic pop songs to ambient meditations. It's bookended by a survey-like opening question, “Do you feel energized about life?,” and closing statement, “Congratulations. You are energized about life. Please proceed,” with simulated excursions into a dance club and elsewhere. If those framing treatments seem a bit silly, be aware they constitute a small part of the album and that the forty-five-minute recording otherwise contains much that rewards attention.

Listeners familiar with the group's previous albums might be startled by the funky electro-pop style of “What Happened to Depth,” but there's no denying the tune's appeal. With vocals delivered both robotically and soulfully (“We got the new 3-D compression tools / Get to thee the new way to be”), the production is buoyed by enticing hooks and drum machine-generated bounce, and even in this seemingly light-hearted production, there's vocal intricacy aplenty. Trondheim Voices' appetite for experimentation emerges in greater amount thereafter. “Every Day Medicine,” for example, backs monotone-delivered ad pitches (e.g., “Get yourselves exposed with Face Magazine”) with convulsive vocal harmonies and spacey instrumental effects. Explorative vocal improv is also central to the album, with “Something” and “Free Rhythms” engrossing examples of the singers' real-time interactions. Subsequent to it, “Conversation of the Gulls” backs a dramatic lead with vocal swoops and shimmering synth chords. Some of the most artistically satisfying material arrives during the album's final third, with “Arpeggio and the Singers” and wondrous “Green Lights” emblematic of the Trondheim Voices sound we've come to know.

Hegdal's presence is evident throughout, be it in synthesizer flutter audible in “A Ballade” or in drum machine patterns elsewhere. Ultimately, however, the album registers as a Trondheim Voices recording in the fullest sense, even if it does in certain moments showcase a poppier side to the band. All of its trademark vocal imagination is present, and the contributions of Hegdal to the project don't make it any less a Trondheim Voices album than its predecessors.

His physical presence is felt considerably more on his release with the Alpaca Ensemble, with whom he's been collaborating for twenty years. While he's often characterized as a jazz saxophonist, the group is described as a contemporary classical trio comprising violinist Sigrid Elisabeth Stang, cellist Marianne Baudouin Lie, and keyboardist Else Bø (piano, glockenspiel, toy piano). The Sky Opens Twice, however, is neither jazz nor classical but instead some wild amalgam of free jazz, improv, experimental, and electro-pop. It's both the trio's eleventh album and a commissioned work by Hegdal, but certainly a major reason for the album's spirit derives from the involvement of Thea Ellingsen Grant, whose vocal delivery and colourful lyrics give the recording much of its personality. If there's an overriding theme or concept, it's less explicitly articulated than the one used for The Sound of Contemporary Living, but The Sky Opens Twice doesn't suffer greatly for being freer in that regard; if anything, that conceptual looseness plays into the freewheeling vibe of the material.

The woozy electronics with which the album begins suggests it'll be far removed from traditional jazz or classical; following a slow unfurl of strings and piano, the character of the project begins to assert itself when percussion, wordless vocals, strings, synthesizer, and saxophone cohere into the trippy space-jazz of “Melogy.” For parts of “Clouding,” Grant adopts a spoken word execution that lends the track the character of a 21st-century poetry reading. Weirder still, “Dream-Bit” could pass in moments for an attempt to update Kurt Weill for 2022. Reminiscent of Trondheim's “Conversation of the Gulls,” “Seagull Serenade” sees Grant wordlessly conversing with a squawking array of simulated birds. Wheezing strings flood through the Alpaca-composed “Garden of Threads” to remind us that contemporary classical's part of the project too. The later “Cherry & Pickle” does much the same in adding a brooding classical-styled setting for strings, piano, and voice to the album.

February 2022