Voices
I've been reading the book Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste by Nolan Gasser. The first few chapters of the book detail the origins of the music streaming service Pandora. I haven't used Pandora for a long time, though I thought it was really cool one of our car stereo systems synced with the driver's Pandora app and you could thumbs up / down songs from the car's display. But there was a period early in college when Pandora was my only online music resource, not yet familiar with Spotify.
I wish I kept that specific account instance active so I could go back and see all my channels. I would obsessively add new artists and songs to channels, rigorously thumbing songs up or down to refine each channel's algorithm.
One of my channels generated from the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo. Trying to sleuth out how I learned of Gesulado in the first place is impossible at this point. Probably from one music class or another, maybe totally random.
I also owned a copy of his Complete Sacred Music for Five Voices performed by the Oxford Camerata.
Musicologically, Gesulado's compositions escape me, because I'm not super familiar with structural conventions of chorale music. Nevertheless, this particular album is completely beautiful and completely devastating, and it is the reason why I love chorale and vocal-centered compositions still.
The compositions on this album are without instrumental accompaniment. Five voices is all. And because of that restriction, the emotional content of the sounds seems more dense.
Hustling through time, a few years ago I started listening to Kristen Hayter's Lingua Ignota project, connecting with her music just as the Caligula album was released. Hayter collaborates with Full of Hell and The Body who I was familiar with before and led to my interest in the Lingua Ignota material.
"FAITHFUL SERVANT FRIEND OF CHRIST" the opening track from Caligula is a song with extreme sensations. Different from Gesualdo's composition just by the fact that there is instrumentation, "FAITHFUL SERVANT" still features vocals as the centerpiece, and Hayter's voice is expansive and etheral. She is backed by what sounds like a string ensemble of some "tet", quin type, maybe. The strings repeat the same phrase as Hayter sings the same stanza over and over.
Most glorious and holy light
Faithful servant and friend of Christ
Most glorious and holy light
Bow before unending nigh
It is a beautiful song, but entirely threatening, like the rest of the album. The musical backdrop to each song is complimentary, but because of the strength and dimensionality of Hayter's voice, it would still contain as much drama to it if she were singing without instrumental support.
Caligula is also the first album that I've heard include a musical "jump scare" in the song "BUTCHER OF THE WORLD". I recommend this album sincerely to anyone who has enough self-awareness and mental safety to put themselves through maybe the heaviest album second or equal to Primitive Man's Caustic.
Vocal performance can take so many forms. Sometimes it is weaker yet complimentary to the instrumentation. Sometimes totally overbearing. Sometimes so staggering in presentation that a solo voice contains a world's worth of feelings.
Take for example Attila Csihar. What I mostly know of Csihar is from his collaborations with the drone band Sunn O))). He plays with Mayhem, too. Csihar has a bewildering operatic voice for a performer who usually plays in metal-adjacent music. His vocals on "Why Dost Thou Hide Thyself in Clouds?" off of Sunn O)))'s live album Dømkirke are exceptional.
The album itself is a a true masterpiece of exploiting natural reverb given that it's recorded in a medieval church in Norway. If you hear Csihar's vocals around the 9ish minute mark and you don't get full body shivers...you....you need some kind of help.
Solo vocal performances or songs and compositions with vocals pronounced stronger than any instrumentation are uniquely spiritual. A voice with such an intense presence seems like the closest we can get to some "voice of God" type feeling. The voice will often seem disembodied from the performer, and especially when multiple voices work in concert, the sound seems no longer of the singers but some separately formed entity.
You may want to lay down for the radio show tomorrow.
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