Colla Voce (Italian for “with the voice”) is the most recent release from bassist and composer Nick Dunston. Dunston himself calls the work an “Afro-Surrealist Anti-Opera” that is based upon the simple proposition that perception is relative. What one might perceive as beautiful or desirable might seem abrasive or detestable to someone else. And, of course, there is a whole lot of middle ground in between. Meaning, the exploration of this proposition is anything but straightforward or binary.
To ensure that, he called together two ensembles for this release: one based in New York consisting of Dunston and the JACK Quartet and one in Berlin consisting of Dunston with various strings, voices (huffs, whispers, chatter, and singing) and percussion. Both undergo a heavy dose of mixing and production. One hears this right away in the opener, “Ova’Churr”, which jolts the listener out of their physical surroundings into the soundworld of the album. Voices, fuzz, hints of music break through. The resulting rift gives way to a potpourri of fractured styles that compile into a postmodern steampunk blur. The third track, “Pseudocorridor”, is a discordant descent into madness worthy of a Hitchcock film. Bent sheets of strings navigate craggy bass lines. Together, they drag out into various pulses and flutters until their collective haphazardly falls into coherence backed by a surprisingly Lynchian bass strut, fitting of the red room itself. One hears hints of jazz, broken, decomposed and maybe even on a bad trip. If the last part of that had any accuracy, track four, “Blinding, Joyous, Fearful“, would be a cruel trick. Fireworks of glissando shoot from and in all directions. Over time, however, they fall into a complicated knotwork of long tones.
By the end, we come to “A Rolling Wave of Everything“, an amped-up electro-punk romp through this strange universe. (This one really gets my heart pumping.) “A Rolling Wave“ is followed by the concluding and titular track “Colla Voce“, which, again, reaches another plane, melding strained vocals and steadily plodding bass. The word steady, it should be noted, applies to few other sections of this album.
Colla Voce is broken, like a strange and glitchy detective noir story with the unseen by omni-presence of some ethereal phenomena. It is like a Twilight Zone for an era infected by AI, fragmented media consumption, and incessant point-and-click, an opera for those mad people devoted to some neo-Nietzschean sense of beauty-in-fracture. It is the breakdown of an order, but one that is wonderous and welcome as it births the new.
Colla Voce is a true statement, a product of real vision. Fans of improvised and experimental music will likely hear the former rather than the latter, or, more likely, just find the beauty in the cacophony.
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