Trondheim Voices + Asle Karstad: Rooms & Rituals
Grappa
No appreciation of Rooms & Rituals is complete without knowing how its material was created. Nine of Trondheim Voices' pool of twelve singers appear on the release, which features twelve settings, all of them improvised but for a melody in the seventh track, “Hymn” and all taken from live performances, including one at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin in 2017. What makes the recording most special, however, is how effectively it documents the way the material was generated: as members of the Norwegian ensemble move freely about the performance space, they wear small wireless boxes called Maccatrols, developed in 2013 for the ensemble by Norwegian sound designer Asle Karstad and Arnvid Lau Karstad, that enable each singer to alter her voice using effects such as reverb, delay, pitch-shifting, and looping. In a Trondheim Voices performance, everything heard is voice-generated and created in real time, and ideally the presentation occurs within a surround setup that collapses the usual separation between performer and audience.
On this release, Anita Kaasbøll, Heidi Skjerve, Live Maria Roggen, Mia Marlen Berg, Tone Åse, Torunn Sævik, and the group's current artistic leader Sissel Vera Pettersen perform, with Ingrid Lode and Siri Gjære joining them on three tracks. Hardly a traditional choir, Trondheim Voices presents itself on the forty-six-minute release as more of an electroacoustic sound art ensemble than anything else. Extended vocal techniques are routinely deployed by the singers in their collective endeavour, resulting in a presentation extending from ambient serenades to animal-like expressions. Often a single voice will position itself as a soloist, with the others supporting her luminous turn with textural commentary.
Rooms & Rituals is an album where each piece brings with it one surprise or another. In the opening “Steamsaw,” variously pitched voices entwine, their stirring expressions hushed and almost ghost-like, until a single voice separates itself with a sorrowful turn that the others punctuate softly. The melodious babble in “Ritual #3” seems to flirt with an African rhythm, whereas “Berlin Memorial,” what with its guttural noises, whistlings, and wails, sounds at times like the amplified field recording of an insect kingdom. A Norwegian folk song provides an emotionally resonant nucleus for “Hymn” that's accompanied by an enveloping swirl as industrial in design as it is supplicating in tone.
“Pulser” charts a bluesier route that grows ever more bold in its combinations of wails and growls, the singers' voices in this case so possessed one might think an exorcism's in process. In places, the material takes an especially nightmarish turn, as evidenced by “Sardin Cluster” and “Room #10,” the latter of which could in certain moments pass for the horror soundtrack to an evisceration procedure. In contrast to those harrowing rides, “Gleam” plays like a lullaby, its soothing quality hardly compromised by the forceful utterances that rise and fall throughout.
The performances are never less than boldly explorative, but they're playful too, and it's easy to visualize children being captivated by a Trondheim Voices performance, even if a group of seven- and eight-year-olds isn't the group's customary audience. As Jazzfest Berlin director Richard Williams so correctly states in the release's liner notes, “For both the singers and their audience, this is music in a constant state of discovery.” For the home listener, too, one might add.August 2018