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2LP
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HH 3160745LP
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Limited restock. Chicago-based Australian vocalist Jessica Aszodi is a performer of notated and improvised music, a researcher, and curator. She bridges the worlds of contemporary art music and the experimental with total conviction. In her genre-bounding career Jessica has premiered over 70 new pieces of notated music, performed works that have lain dormant for centuries and collaborated with a constellation of artists. She is co-director of the vocal festival Resonant Bodies Australia. Prayer for Nil is a composer/performer experiment for electronics and voice. Each piece is its own microcosm of unfolding connections, decisions and influences, negotiating varying degrees of control and freedom. If there is a common thread amongst them, it is that they all push her vocalic body towards its limits. The voice on this record is not the voice of a unified and cogent human, it is the mutable voice of someone wailing unrestrained in passionate argument. The composers are Anthony Pateras (Mike Patton, PIVIXKI, Pateras/Fox), James Rushford (Oren Ambarchi, Golden Fur), Alexander Garsden (Erkki Veltheim, Melbourne Symphony), and Jeanette Little (Speak Percussion).
"In Anthony Pateras' "Prayer for Nil" the electronics are a swell of voices so dense they seem inhuman, amassed like a threatening cloud. As the piece unfolds the masses thin to a taper. By its conclusion the solitary singer is left brutally alone, though it's hard to tell if she wasn't alone the whole time - every voice in the throng was my own. In "[ja] maser" Alexander Garsden deals with relationships between groups of pitches and non-traditional vocal utterances to create cresting swarms of vocality that grow, splinter and re-germinate. In the second half of the piece, a more vulnerable voice emerges, broken and crumpled in the low depths of my range. James Rushford's piece is the most overtly inspired by composer-performer relationship. Composed material was conveyed to me though an audio-score, piped point-blank into my ear. In Jeanette Little's "Mechanical Bride", my singing voice represents anima in an automated world. The text comes from Enrico Cavacchioli's 1914 poem, Let the moon be damned, in which he describes a decaying environment where humans entwine with machines. The dystopic picture painted in this poem still convinces. As I perform this piece, I stage inside myself a battle between flaw-filled human expressivity and savage, ancient machines. Jeanette's sound world pays homage to an analog era, mid-century modernist instrumental and electronic techniques in a milieu that is something like a space-western."
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