Massimo Carozzi & Sandrine Nicoletta — Interplay

The duo of Massimo Carozzi and Sandrine Nicoletta have created Interplay in combination with three other vocalists, for a total of five.  In this piece of process oriented sound art, the five singers recorded themselves independently, without listening to each other, and then combined the result.

Spoken and half-sung voices, male and female, panned left and right, at roughly speaking volume (or quieter), comprise the entire album, giving the intimate impression of being close to the mic and ear.  Their performances are a spontaneous collection of phrases, hums and sounds: free jazz for the voice.  There are also, on occasion, processed loops of voice, but mostly it has the feel of a raw recording.

The utterances of the vocalists begin bold and outspoken and trail off into ever fainter hums, whistles, grunting breaths.  You might say it highlights the silence, and begins to elongate time, as you settle into the 'zone' with the performers.  As the performers are making no attempt at traditional music form of structure, it's the kind of music a non-musician could just as effectively make.

The album is very short in total, at 21 minutes, but honestly, already begins to drag within this time.  It is the non-committal, vaguely muttering nature of it, the fact that five people are engaged in some kind of performance, yet it still seems very little is going on, as if the sound recorded is only 10% of the performance going on in the players' heads, and the rest never made it out of their minds into corporeal reality.

There are only slight hints at ideas or structures forming amidst the whimsy.  The meandering tuneless hums and whistles which comprise the majority of the vocal performances here are something of a trope of uninspired free improvisation.  If this album was an experiment to see what spontaneous cohesion emerged between discreet vocal performances, I would say the answer is unfortunately very little.  In my view this has to do with the performances themselves, which seem hesitant and lacking ideas and energy, as if recorded late at night whilst trying to avoid waking others.

I appreciate the experimental nature of this recording, but find it frustratingly never rises above the level of the whisper, and feels much like listening to someone talk to themselves in the background of a video clip that was recorded by accident.  I suppose it is not ultimately surprising that there is a perceived lack of intentionality in a recording made by colliding five uncoordinated performances. To find out more