Ekmeles: Nonsongs
New Focus Recordings

Arguably no contemporary vocal ensemble is more daring than NYC-based Ekmeles (Charlotte Mundy, Elisa Sutherland, Timothy Parsons, Tomás Cruz, Steven Hrycelak, and Musical Director Jeffrey Gavett). As if its earlier releases, A howl, that was also a prayer (2020) and We Live the Opposite Daring (2024), didn't already argue that point, it's rendered incontrovertible by its third, Nonsongs, and the trio of works George Lewis, Wolfgang Von Schweinitz, and Katherine Balch fashioned expressly for it and the ensemble. Whereas another vocal outfit might focus its attention on harmonizing celestially, Ekmeles leaves standardized singing behind for microtonality, extended techniques, and other innovative strategies. As challenging as the music is, it's all the more valuable for being so audacious. This group's efforts have been formally recognized too, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation's Ensemble Prize it received in 2023—the first American group to be so honoured—a case in point.

While that emphasis on microtonality is taken to an extreme on Wolfgang von Schweinetz's Plainsound Motet for Ekmeles: "DADA NONO & REJOICE,” Ekmeles finds its preoccupation with extended vocal techniques and alternative timbres well-served by Katherine Balch's forgetting and George Lewis's Lone Coast, her seven-minute setting dwarfed by the twenty-minute behemoths on either side.

It's fitting that the release, recorded at Mt. Vernon's Oktaven Audio in 2024 and 2026, would begin with von Schweinetz's material when both he and the group have intensively explored microtonality and alternate tuning systems (viz., just intonation). As contemporary as the music is, the composer's affinity for Renaissance vocal music emerges conspicuously, and when it does the tension between an earlier sounding style and one grounded in just intonation makes for a striking result. Enunciating syllables, the group advances through the piece's episodes with authority, beginning with Tuvan-styled throat singing and overlapping drones. Soon enough, the trajectory the music follows grows complex as the arrangement increases in contrapuntal intricacy. Individual voices separate themselves from the whole, but each component remains clearly audible when the number of singers totals six only. It's a fascinating piece: whereas the soothing passage arising nine minutes along recalls the kind one might hear delivered in a small chapel, microtonal combinations elsewhere brand the work as one clearly emblematic of a contemporary sensibility. Abrupt shifts in dynamics, pitch, and mood are executed with precision, making for a gripping demonstration of vocal artistry.

It's not easy following a piece of such impact, but Balch's forgetting definitely holds its own; the inspired addition of percussion (ratchets, specifically) to the arrangement helps too. A glossolalic barrage of colliding voice fragments initiates the piece, after which the clack of the ratchets surfaces to broaden the sound field. The coupling of the percussive thrum and stuttering voice effects makes for another arresting performance. With the activity level intense, the mass swells ecstatically, but intervals of rest and calm emerge as reprieves too. Broken word utterances morph into a harmonized drone as the end approaches, the ratchets collecting into a thrumming mass as a counterpoint.

July 2026