Birdtalking

These pieces were recorded in the Sendesaal at Radio Bremen from 23 to 27 February 2004. Most are pure vocal performances, reacting to the acoustic of the hall in diverse (and diversely-miked) ways, although "siamese"and "nightcap" involve multi tracking, and the two "multipel" pieces use electronic reverberation (controlled by the performer). Typical of Ute Wassermann´s work is the way in which each piece evolves its own subtle colour and structure out of a particular selection from her vast  (and always growing) repertoire of sounds and sound-gestures. Each piece has a composed frame work, defining a space within which the voice can make movements and explore various limits and boundaries. Some pieces are reminiscent of bird or insect sounds while others seem more related to electronic, bleeps and pulses, or the sounds of machinery. Each piece, one might say, embodies a different style of calligraphy, with which the voice inscribes itself in space and time. Each also alludes tangentially to one or more of the others, setting up a subtle network of cross-references which bind them into a single multifaceted statement. Sounds from diverse musical traditions, such as yodelling, throat-tremoli, trill techniques and so forth, occasionally appear, but not as quotations, instead forming each time a particular kind of continuity and combination with the “new” sounds. While many other practicioners of "extended vocal techniques” base their explorations around a central stylistic core, be this Jazz or classical singing or one or other of the many musical traditions which feature idiosyncratic vocal behaviour, for Ute Wassermann the core and the exploration are one and the same. At the same time, the resulting music is always exquisitely poetic and expressive, rather than remaining no more than a demonstration of its materials, and emerges from an artistic sensibility for which any kind of sound can be the subject first of fascination and then of transformation into a new vocalism. Richard Barrett