Roomful of Teeth: Rough Magic
New Amsterdam Records

It's been eight long years since Render, Roomful of Teeth's last full-length album, though the experimental vocal ensemble has issued a number of releases in the interim, most notably 2020's EP-length recordings Just Constellations and The Ascendant. A few things have changed since the appearance of its sophomore album, most noticeably personnel. While many of the Grammy-winning group's original members remain on the new release—founder Brad Wells and singers Estelí Gomez, Martha Cluver, Caroline Shaw, Eric Dudley, Dashon Burton, and Cameron Beauchamp (the latter now sharing Artistic Director duties with Wells)—the inclusion of new blood on Rough Magic makes it feel like the work of a new iteration.

What hasn't changed is the group's boundary-pushing approach; in fact, Rough Magic sees it advancing well beyond the already daring work of its previous releases into even more adventurous territory. While there are numerous first-rate vocal ensembles operating today—Conspirare, Skylark, and VOCES8 spring to mind—none is doing anything quite like what Roomful of Teeth does on this new collection. Rest assured, this tremendous achievement in vocal artistry and technique sounds like nothing you've heard before.

Premiere recordings of four works appear, each fascinating in its own right and collectively a stunning portrait. A three-part setting by album producer William Brittelle is first, followed by ones by Eve Beglarian, Peter S. Shin, and long-time group member Caroline Shaw. Conventional language is often left behind, not only in the texts themselves but in the vocal techniques deployed. Guttural noises of the kind more associated with non-human creatures abound alongside tremulous whispers. All sounds are voice-generated but for sweeping synthesizer textures contributed by Dudley and Brittelle, audible in the latter's brain-addling Psychedelics. Jon Verney's dazzling covert art is a fitting analogue to the wildness contained within.

In choosing the work's title, Brittelle wanted to evoke the term's meaning as “a plethora of bright and vivid (almost surreal) colours blended and twisted in strange, otherworldly ways.” Vocally, the piece embodies his attempt to collect the panorama of vocal techniques of which the group is capable into a single expression. Building on subject matter grounded in a personal psychological breakdown he experienced as a young man and a belief in the imminent arrival of human apocalypse, Brittle created collage-like text that's replicated in the blinding barrage of the vocal delivery. Graceful choral harmonies, complex counterpoint, and spoken passages collide with ear-splitting declamations, animalistic growls, banshee wails, and operatic enunciations as the singers deliver tonally complementary lines such as “Nothing is a dream in this world, nothing is a dream” and the Leonard Cohen-nodding “There's a crack in the dome where the light comes in.”

Beglarian's None More Than You couples the vocal ensemble with The Dessoff Choirs in a single-movement piece whose design was influenced by a passage from Kierkegaard's Sickness unto Death, which reads, in part, “Necessity is like a sequence of consonants only, but in order to utter them there must in addition be possibility.” During the first half of the work, Beglarian has Roomful of Teeth sing a biblical passage using only consonants, a seemingly impossible task but one successfully met. The Dessoff choir responds with lines from Whitman's A Song of the Rolling Earth, and as the piece develops Roomful of Teeth transitions from consonants to vowels. Vocal buzzing, smears, writhing, and phizzes intersect with the conventionally sung lines of the guest ensemble, the piece a startling phantasmagoria that becomes an ethereal hymn by the work's end.

At album's close, Shin's Bits torn from words explores the mental health condition of generalized anxiety disorder, a state that sees circumstances of minor import blown wildly out of proportion. Shin uses a plethora of vocal techniques to render the condition into musical form. As a soloist wails in a desperate plea for contact, “Reach across oceans (intro)” offsets that raw expression with gentle choral murmurs before “I'm terrible at making decisions (refrain)” and “Notice how your body spreads like water (post-refrain)” shift the focus to obsessive, torrential outpourings of repeated utterances. The arrestingly titled “GaNaDaRaMaBaSa AJaChaKaTaPaHa (bridge)” focuses on the fourteen consonants of the Korean alphabet, voices building here into rippling, oscillating waves, after which the work concludes with a stirring polyphony of supplicating voices.

As mesmerizing as those three works are, it's Shaw's haunting, spell-casting The Isle that is the album's high point. Using three monologues by Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero from The Tempest for text, the five-part work begins with “a cloud of murmuring voices” (her words), an invocation that feels as if it's luring people to the island. After the scene-setting “Prologue,” an intricate arrangement of wordless fragments that helps establish the work's magical character, delicate voices in “Arial” deliver a seductive invitation (“Come unto these yellow sands / And then take hands”) that swells repeatedly from an hypnotic hush to a rapturous wail. Accompanied by unearthly island noises, a single soloist deepens the spell with the monodic folk lament “Caliban”; “Prospero" follows with a dynamic, rapid-fire enumeration of the island's inhabitants and features that in turn leads to the “Epilogue” and the return of the wordless, stuttering voices featured at the work's beginning.

October 2023