Ekmeles: A Howl, That Was Also A Prayer
New Focus Recordings

A recording I've often returned to is The Complete 10-Inch Series from Cold Blue, a three-CD set issued in 2003 whose contents originally appeared on ten-inch vinyl in the early ‘80s. The reason I mention it here is that appearing alongside pieces by Rick Cox, Daniel Lentz, and others are Read Miller's Mile Zero Hotel and The Blueprint of a Promise, both of which utilize unadorned speaking voices to mesmerizing and strikingly musical effect. It's impossible not to be reminded of Miller's pieces as I listen to A Howl, That Was Also a Prayer, the debut album by the New York-based contemporary vocal ensemble Ekmeles, when its realizations of works by Erin Gee, Christopher Trapani, and Taylor Brook (two of them Ekmeles commissions) mesmerize in similar manner.

Like Miller, the three contemporary composers maximize the expressive potential of the speaking voice, its capacity for contrasting rhythms, cadences, inflections, and dynamics, while the virtuosic Ekmeles—soprano Charlotte Mundy, mezzo-soprano Elisa Sutherland, countertenor Tim Keeler, tenor Steven Bradshaw, bass Steven Hrycelak, and baritone (and group director) Jeffrey Gavett—rises to the demands of the innovative material throughout the near hour-long release. In Ancient Greek music theory, the group name refers to “tones of indefinite pitch and intervals with complex ratios,” and certainly fine microtonal gradations of pitch enter into the performances of the Trapani and Brook pieces. Gee's Three Scenes from Sleep completes the trio fittingly with its own plethora of extended vocal techniques.

With text culled from David Ohle's science-fiction novel Motorman, Brook's nine-part Motorman Sextet is an epic, half-hour excursion into microtonality, just intonation a central part of its design. The delivery fluctuates between spoken and sung passages as Ekmeles' members enhance the narration of the novel's storyline with myriad techniques. Voices gather into strange wordless wholes before parts splinter off and then rejoin. As words are spoken by one member (sometimes multiple voices in unison), the others present counterpoints that are so unusual they threaten to draw attention away from the narrative, and with the arrangement and vocal techniques constantly changing, listening engagement never weakens. During some moments, the vocal textures veer into choral territory; at other times, however, the vocal effects are so alien, no obvious categorical precedent exists to which they might be compared. Adding to the effect, one member's delivery might seem bored and another's impassioned, and hisses, howls, hums, whispers, and animal-like sounds also surface. Lines of text are passed between male and female voices like a ball thrown from one player to the next.

Intended to capture the unconscious mind during various sleep stages, Gee's Three Scenes from Sleep eschews spoken text for wordless movements packed with idiosyncratic effects, from thrums and clicks to glissandi swoops and gravelly murmurings. Hisses resemble steam being released from an overdriven machine during “Scene 4, Abyss,” after which pops, coos, and whistles create a field of agitated babble in “Scene 7, Transparency,” the nine-minute whole amounting to a dizzying array of vocal treatments. Using texts from poems by Anis Mojgani, Ciara Shuttleworth, and John Ashbery, Trapani's twenty-minute End Words parts company with its predecessors by working electronics into its three-part design; specifically, the ensemble's six voices combine with their electronic counterparts as pre-recorded vocal parts blend with live performance. The electronic dimension aside, Trapani's piece is closer in spirit to Brook's in merging text elements with vocal techniques, even if the electronic applications in Trapani's lend the result a greater hallucinogenic quality. Bird chirps, water burble, string plucks, and percussive accents also surface to dramatically extend the sound palette.

Regardless of differences between the works, they form a solidly cohesive whole and collectively provide the singers with marvelous showcases for their vocal abilities. In being less predicated on conventional melody and compositional forms, A Howl, That Was Also A Prayer mightn't offer the immediacy that a recording by a vocal ensemble such as The Crossing, Vox, or Roomful of Teeth would have. Listeners with an appetite for adventurous and original music-making should, however, find much to appreciate about Ekmeles' rather remarkable debut.

February 2020