HOSPITAL HILL Prayer For Nil [VINYL]

Best of Bandcamp (Contemporary Classical) May/June 2017. 'a dense, elegant tapestry' - Resident Advisor. Chicago based Australian vocalist Jessica Aszodi is a performer of notated and improvised music, a researcher & curator. She bridges the worlds of contemporary art music & 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 & collaborated with a constellation of artists. She is co-director - with Jane Sheldon - of the vocal festival Resonant Bodies Australia & an artistic associate & curator of BIFEM (the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music). Prayer for Nil is a composer/performer experiment for electronics & voice. Each piece is its own microcosm of unfolding connections, decisions & influences, negotiating varying degrees of control & 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: Anthony Pateras (Mike Patton, PIVIXKI, Pateras/Fox) James Rushford (Oren Ambarchi, Golden Fur) Alexander Garsden (Erkki Veltheim, Melbourne Symphony) Jeanette Little (Speak Percussion, NTS Radio). Jessica on the pieces - 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 her own - my own. In [ja] maser Alexander Garsden deals with very specific relationships between groups of pitches & non-traditional vocal utterances to create cresting swarms of noisy vocality that grow, splinter & re-germinate. In the second half of the piece a more vulnerable voice emerges, broken & crumpled in the low depths of my range. The composer bids me gradually to ascend to the highest extremes of my instrument's capacity until that too fractures & breaks. James Rushford's piece is the most overtly inspired by composerperformer relationship. Composed material was conveyed to me though an audio-score, piped point-blank into my ear. Some of these recordings are heard within the piece. 'Out of this process emerges two interconnected characters - my own desperate & confused, & Jessica's more calming yet somewhat stuttered. A deeply intimate conversation of mangled speech & murmured singing results, unclear in meaning but rich in expression.' (Rushford). 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, now 100 years old, still convinces. As I perform this piece, I stage inside myself a battle between flaw-filled human expressivity & savage, ancient machines. Jeanette's sound world pays homage to an analogue era, mid-century modernist instrumental & electronic techniques in a milieu that is something like a space-western. Tracklisting 1: Prayer for Nil Anthony Pateras (Performed by Jessica Aszodi / Electronics by Anthony Pateras) 2: [ja] maser Alexander Garsden (Performed by Jessica Aszodi / Electronics by Alexander Garsden) 3: The fabric of wind James Rushford (Performed by Jessica Aszodi & James Rushford / Electronics by James Rushford) 4: Mechanical Bride Jeanette Little (Text includes fragments of Enrico Cavacchioli's: 'Let the moon be damned' Performed by Jessica Aszodi / Electronics by Jeannette Little & Joe Talia ).