(2020) Simon Kirby, Tommy Perman, Rob St John - Sing the Gloaming


Review:
Sing the Gloaming is as much conceptual art project as musical work, the collaboration between University of Edinburgh professor Simon Kirby and artist/musicians Tommy Perman and Rob St. John having earlier incarnated as a temporary art installation in a Dundee shop window and damp Scottish forest. Issued on the Edinburgh-based Blackford Hill imprint, this half-hour recorded treatment has the potential to reach the broadest audience, and deservedly so. While its conceptual roots run deep, it’s also a thoroughly engrossing listen, and no advanced art degree is needed to engage with the material. That said, the project’s academic background is both fascinating and, naturally, integral to the work’s character and design. All three participants are curious and experimentally disposed by nature: Kirby’s academic interests centre on the origin and evolution of language, and as interdisciplinary are Perman, an artist, designer and musician, and St. John, a rural Lancashire-based artist, writer, and musician who plays in the band Modern Studies. For Sing the Gloaming, the three recruited a number of Scottish vocalists, Kenny Anderson, Nerea Bello, Aidan Moffat, Emily Scott, Su Shaw, Hanna Tuulikki and Andrew Wasylyk, and asked each to vocalize based on a provided set of ‘light words’ starting with ‘gl’ (glint, glimmer, glow, gleam, etc.). Each singer was tasked with responding to the previous singer’s recording with further improvisations, the end result an assemblage of related vocal expressions that the originators then assembled into five pieces, one a fifteen-minute construction and the others shorter treatments. The production process was anything but arbitrarily determined; on the contrary, Kirby, Perman, and St. John purposefully devised the approach so that the evolution of vocal creation would mirror language evolution in general, ‘gl’ words having originated from a single word spoken over 5,000 years ago near the Black Sea. Sonic evidence of the modular synthesizers, granular synthesis, and convolution reverbs used and applied during the production process are audible, though never so excessively they negate the voice-centric essence of the project. Side A’s “Phonaestheme” begins with a single voice thrice intoning ‘ghlei,’ after which other vocal parts gradually emerge, some spoken and some sung. Just before the two-minute mark, a female voice enters with a figure one might encounter on a Meredith Monk recording, and vocal parts of varying pitches and durations are woven into an endless series of combinations, the result more than a little hypnotic. Development advances organically from one episode to the next, with the brief re-emergence of ‘ghlei’ followed by the bright dance of a voice intoning ‘glint.’ Halfway through, the voices take on a supplicating quality reminiscent of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. During one sequence, wave-like movements and transitions call to mind the structural design of Music for 18 Musicians, but “Phonaestheme” never sits still long enough to assume a singular structural form. In contrast to the vocal set-piece “Phonaestheme,” the B-side’s opener “Borrowing” plays like an experimental club track when a pulsating beat pattern appears alongside the vocal fragments, the result interesting but less compelling than its fifteen-minute predecessor. Ghostly transmissions and spectral atmospheres suggest “Onset and Rime” would have made a seamless addition to the soundtrack for Kubrick’s The Shining alongside its Penderecki and Ligeti pieces. At album’s end, ‘glint’ harmonies give the closing “Reconstructed Form” a rather Moonglows-like vibe and emphasize the project’s playful side. The effect is mesmerizing, a word one might credibly apply to the recording in general. Any release that includes material as transfixing as “Phonaestheme” and “Reconstructed Form” definitely warrants attention.





Tracklist:
01 - Phonaestheme
02 - Borrowing
03 - Organised Breathing
04 - Onset and Rime
05 - Reconstructed Form


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, classical
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits