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Human Sounds,
Painful or Haunting -
The Ensemble Ekmeles AT
Roulette in Brooklyn
Painful or Haunting -
The Ensemble Ekmeles AT
Roulette in Brooklyn
NY Times
January 25, 2013
by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
Originally published
in The NY Times
(Link︎︎︎)
On Thursday evening Ekmeles presented a selection of vocal works by six living American composers at Roulette in Downtown Brooklyn, as part of the Interpretations series, that brought forth sounds from the human body that were at times painful, alienating, startling and haunting, but always fascinating.
Sometimes they were even gorgeous, as in “Shiroi Ishi,” an a cappella work by Ken Ueno. Mr. Ueno is a composer on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, who in his own singing explores and expands the eerie overtones created by techniques like Tuvan throat singing.
Here, too, he drew unusual sonorities from the singers in a setting of his own poem, in Japanese, about a white stone sinking into a moonlit ocean. Quiet sustained chords and shifting harmonies that sometimes brought Gesualdo to mind floated in and out of pitchless vocalizations, ghostly exhalations and percussive consonants.
Sometimes they were even gorgeous, as in “Shiroi Ishi,” an a cappella work by Ken Ueno. Mr. Ueno is a composer on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, who in his own singing explores and expands the eerie overtones created by techniques like Tuvan throat singing.
Here, too, he drew unusual sonorities from the singers in a setting of his own poem, in Japanese, about a white stone sinking into a moonlit ocean. Quiet sustained chords and shifting harmonies that sometimes brought Gesualdo to mind floated in and out of pitchless vocalizations, ghostly exhalations and percussive consonants.