This CD from Norwegian ALBEDO label features pieces for voice and electronics. The leaflet from the label explains that the choice of pieces was arrived at according to their strong female force from different cultures and times, and sure enough the pieces range from 1960’s Italy to 1996’s Brazil, but Alejandro Viñao, who is the composer with the Brazilian descent probably resides in Britain since long, and has been very active around the British Isles and France.

The featured artist is the Norwegian mezzo soprano Hilde Torgersen, who has premiered works by James Dillon, Arne Nordheim, Rolf Wallin, Asbjørn Schaathun and others, and recorded CDs with ensembles like Cikada, Oslo Sinfonietta, Sisu etcetera, while in addition participating in many other ventures.

Track 1 is Alejandro Viñao’s ”Masago’s Confession” for female voice and electronics. He says about this piece:

”Masago’s Confession’ is a scene from the chamber opera ’Rashomon’ which I wrote for the opening of the new buildings at Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Germany 1997. The libretto is written by Graig Raine, and is based on a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. The story is better known in the West as the film ’Rashomon’ by Akira Kurosawa.”
The horrible contents of the chamber opera are better not mentioned, since I believe there is too much bad tidings in the news everyday for us humans to cope with, but it can be said, with Viñao’s words, that the piece is ”structured as an aria in which Masago sings alone, facing o monk who listens in stillness in a Japanese temple.”

With a tingle left and right, milliseconds apart, the vocals are conjured up out of the electronic drone, sharing the progression with a flute, perhaps a shakuhachi, be it real or dreamed, factual or electronic. Hilde Torgersen interacts with the electronic sounds in a in-and-out manner, where she sometimes merges with the meandering fluency of instruments or visions of instruments, disappearing in the sonic web, simply acting on an equal level with any other sounds in Viñao’s web – only to reappear in her own strong vocal identity, prying open the web, inching her way out into the sunlight, where she slowly rotates in shining bliss, like a golden angelic vision above the clouds of summer. The electronic soundscape is skillfully shaped and handled, having all sorts of auditory shapes and figures arise out of silence, moving like soap bubbles, reflecting the surrounding soundscape of voice and acoustic instruments.
Sometimes very clear sentences can be heard, until they become unintelligible in the general scope of events, moving steadily forward in a wobbly fashion.
At times Hilde Torgersen sounds like a modern folksinger with historical affinities, or a Dalecarlian woman calling her cows out of the woods, so-called ”kulning” (in Swedish). Other times she sounds as if she is performing something written by Swedish composer Karin Rehnqvist, who has been very successful in picking up impulses and nuances from old Swedish rural cattle-calling traditions. There is a strong erotic fragrance in the way Hilde Torgersen shapes and molds her voice, while it is also conveying a dancing, rambling spiritual force, and at times the flute that is heard intertwined with Torgersen’s voice reminds me of ”Kathinkas Gesang” from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera ”Samstag aus Licht”, which is supposed to work just like the Bardo Thödol; the Tibetan Book of the Dead, guiding the deceased person along to enlightenment or rebirth. Torgersen’s voice and Viñao’s music takes you for long journey’s along the wondrous paths of analogy!

Track 2 is also one of Alejandro Viñao’s most well-known works, appearing, for example, on a CD from INA.GRM, the famous Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris; ”Hildegard’s Dream”.
Viñao says about ”Hildegard’s Dream”:

”Hildegard von Bingen, the legendary visionary, composer, poet and religious figure of the Middle Ages, was continually plagued by illness throughout most of her life. In 1141 these afflictions receded and gave way to a series of religious visions, which were recorded in the book ’Know the Ways’. Amidst these visions, Hildegard von Bingen had a dream, too awesome, too frightening, too beautiful to be recorded or even to be acknowledged to anybody. […] It was a musical dream; the armies of Islam overrunning Europe. Hildegard [in her dream] is attending a performance of one of her vocal compositions, which the Lord has revealed to her in one of her visions. The piece is sung by 80 nuns of her own convent. Half way through the performance the nuns start singing long notes that unfold microtonal intervals and motifs, which no longer speak of God but suggest the forbidden modes of the infidel. The original melismatic rhythms have now turned into a figuration with no clear meter. The text, still in Latin, features both the names of Christ and Allah. The dream would be an intolerable nightmare if the music weren’t so overwhelmingly beautiful. Hildegard is suddenly woken up by her own singing.”

Layers of beautifully spun vocal drones evolve, male and female; one female voice clearer and more naked than the others. The male voices build a foundation, above and through which the manifold guises of the female intensity fly and dive. Hilde Torgersen expresses Hildegard’s sentiments in masterly vocal spirals and garlands, in a peculiar mix of Nordic folk phrases and Medieval chant, at times seeping down into the netherworlds of the electronics, where granular synthesis and time-stretching events spin elastic bands of isolated overtones through the general maze of timbral shimmers. Torgersen’s voice and the electronic treatments and permutations of Alejandro Viñao come across like the shrill brittleness of thin glass, of shining wine glasses in afternoon light through tinted windows… Beautiful! Glass music! Ping! Ting!
Much of this music is an excess into the timbral possibilities of the overtones of voices and electronics, painting gold upon clear blue, orthodox colors, sublime colors, clarity of decisive intentions of a Medieval mind of purest thought.

Giacinto Scelsi, the Italian mystic who has had many a posthumous CD released, is next with two tracks, actually subdivided into several sub-trackings. Scelsi’s first entry – “Hô” – is divided into 5 sub-tracks (3 – 7). There is also a subtitle attached; “five melodies for soprano”. The CD booklet describes ”Hô” as a work of Asian inspiration, with a meditative and poetic expression. The booklet text deliberates:
“Scelsi could sit for hours and listen to the spectrum of overtones contained in certain tones of the piano. Overtones had a powerful influence on the structure of his music. […] This is a prominent feature […] in folk music. Perhaps [that is why] the fourth movement of ”Hô” seems a little reminiscent of Norwegian folk music and Edvard Grieg.”

The second Scelsi title – on tracks 8 – 12 – is “Taiagaru”, which is also called “five evocations for soprano”.

I’ve heard strictly vocal music by Scelsi before, through the voices of Michiko Hirayama (“Canti del Capricorno” on Wergo) and the Helix Ensemble (“tre canti popolari”, “wo ma” & “sa uh” on Sub Rosa), but Hilde Torgersen sounds much more like Swedish Lapland and West Coast sound artist Hebriana Alainentalo on these Scelsi takes; the nervous, slightly insane tweaks and twines of the mind, oozing up through the vocal chords, out into the open, caught on these plastic discs in long, binary successions! Life is wild, wild! Those seeking reason, logic or fairness are at loss! Enjoy the insanity through this here life and all the other lives to come! Giddy-up!

Torgersen slides down slippery ice-age rocks and climbs with wild exertion up sandy slopes of gravel pits, sliding down one step for each two steps up, resulting, nonetheless in an ascension of sorts, raising her into a meditation of the voice, which slowly but crazily circles itself in an inbound spiral, which, after reaching the center knot, unwinds again into an open spiral that embraces an ever-expanding space-time continuum. In these solo works for voice (with no electronic treatments) Hilde Torgersen’s voice arises in its ultimate clarity and inherent beauty of timbre. It wells forth like clear, cool water from a well in the forest!

The concluding piece is track 13; “La fabbrica illuminata” by Luigi Nono. According to the booklet Nono regarded this piece as “a virtual sound theater”. It is intended for voice and 4-channel tape: “It sets a female voice in the center of a cross projection of factory sounds and some choral parts. The singer functions as a commentator of the life and the drama in the factory. The factory sounds were recorded at the Italsider plant in Genova-Cornigliano. The text is taken from the poem ‘La fabbrica illuminata’ by Giuliano Scabia and a fragment from ‘Due poesie’ by Cesare Pavese.” (Booklet text by Kenneth Karlsson)

Yes, a piece like this could well be expected of a man like Luigi Nono, who four years after this work wrote music based on the writings on the walls of the cities of Western Europe during the revolutionary year of 1968, and who could name one of his works “Non Consumiame Marx”; a slogan from a wall in Paris! Nono was for music what Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rudi Dutschke was for politics in those days.
In this work - “La fabbrica illuminata” – the factory takes on the illusion of a cathedral, where angelic choirs praise the divinity as rays of sun shine down from high windows through the rising incense… but it turns out the incense is steel dust from the manufacturing process which the economically chained proletariat is managing…
Soon the industrial sounds – long before the Too Much Too Soon Orchestra – blend in, yes, cut in like sharp knives through the liturgy, and all illusions of heavenly bliss lay wasted under the merciless insight into the human situation through the ages, wherein, nonetheless, a core of divine, celestial peace is safe-guarded.
This is a music of meek gazes and tons of steel, of the most fragile poem and a thunderous noise.