iSing Silicon Valley: love & light
Avie Records

iSing Silicon Valley separates itself from other vocal ensembles in being a girl choir, its members brought together and guided through their paces by artistic directors Jennah Delp Somers and Shane Troll. In the absence of that clarifying detail, one would still hear the difference immediately in the beautiful sound the young singers' treble voices produce. On its second full-length album, the Bay Area-based vocal outfit celebrates ten years of existence by delivering a stunning selection of performances and collaborating with harpist Cheryl Fulton and soprano Estelí Gomez. love & light is very much an iSing Silicon Valley release, but the contributions of Fulton and Gomez are critical to the recording's impact and identity.

Under Somers' conduction, forty-seven iSing members participated in the project, which includes settings by Sir James MacMillan, Hildegard of Bingen, Andrew Smith, Gabriel Jackson, Kile Smith, and others. The joyous sound the singers produce here takes on greater force when the pandemic shutdown prevented them from singing together and instead of having to do so remotely. For an ensemble as close-knit as a choir, such an attempt, while valiant, was a poor substitute for the transformative experience of singing side-by-side. Able to share the same space while recording the fifty-four-minute album at Mont La Salle Chapel in Napa, California in mid-2022, the singers couldn't help but invest their performances with even greater rapture. That the character of the music they chose for their sophomore effort is often sacred and emphasizes healing, remembrance, and love also factors into the impact the recording makes. As Somers states, love & light constitutes “a beautiful synthesis of our coming together and being a choir again.”

Not just a vocal ensemble, iSing Silicon Valley actively commissions new material, examples of which—chorea lucis by California-based Kenyon Duncan and Lux Aeterna by South Korean Sungji Hong—appear on the release. Gomez elevates the album significantly on the four settings on which she appears. Her magnificent soprano has been heard on record before (including on a number of releases by Roomful of Teeth, of which she's a member), but her performances on love & light are particularly powerful. Fulton likewise is in no way incidental to the album's impact when her crystalline harp graces almost every one of the thirteen racks. Testifying to her heightened role, she appears alone on Inchcolm Antiphoner's folk-like chant O Columba.

The set opens on an entrancing hush with Macmillan's Os Mutorum, the singers' haunting voices beautifully complemented by Fulton's softly shimmering harp. The purity of the singers' sound as the music rises is merely one of the things that makes its sound so appealing. In contrast to the quiet grandeur of Os Mutorum, Jackson's Ubi Flumen Praesulis finds iSing Silicon Valley emoting ecstatically, the music even in moments calling to mind the 1987 album Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares.

June 2023