Ruth Wilhelmine Meyer — One Voices

Here’s a pro-printed and duplicated CD in a digipak case, complete with a large booklet, featuring around 40 minutes of vocal pieces from Ruth Wilhelmine Meyer. The tracks are constructed from layers of vocal performances, and the booklet and label spiel take great pains to loudly point out that the works are free of processing, an odd claim to my mind, but we’ll get to that later.

It would be fair to say that most of the pieces draw on the same or similar sounds, though there are a couple of shorter ones that showcase certain techniques or sounds, for example, ‘Entrance’, the opening track, which features clicking noises darting around the sound field, or ‘Whisper’ which sounds how you imagine it might, and ‘Serrated’, a very effective work created with layers of clicking and chirruping, it’s short but a nice piece to listen to on repeat and follow the different layers and frequencies. Away from these shorter works are longer tracks, often building using a variety of vocal techniques and moving through distinct sections. The best of these are ‘The Loki Castle - for single voices’, the 14 minute centrepiece of the album, and ‘Reflections’. The former begins with breathy tones and small atonal vocal scurries, and continues to foreground smaller sounds over louder background tones - long whistling tones, for example; as the piece proceeds it develops and becomes more layered and there are some very good, engrossing moments - though the vaguely choral section near the end doesn’t hit home as hard as it might. ‘Reflections’, just short of seven minutes in length, has some multiphonic shrieking and drones made of voice cracking; it’s probably my favourite track here.

This is a good album; if I have a criticism, it’s that it is technically aware but rarely overtly adventurous, there’s a sense that it’s self-contained and a bit safe - it feels like it could explode out to the listener but never achieves that. Having said that, conversely, it does effectively create an intimacy which draws the listener in, and sometimes has a disarming simplicity that is quite beautiful: the solo unadorned voice of the final track, ‘Aftermath’, for example. In that regard it is a work that will find a home with people for whom Diamanda Galas is ‘too much’ - ‘Reflections’ is probably the most ‘noisy’ piece and that sounds like the politest Galas track. I do find it strange that the booklet and label spiel highlight the ‘unprocessed’ nature of the vocals, mainly because none of the vocals sound processed to me… though in this area I should mention that some of the pieces, for example, ‘Trinity’, were recorded using the incredible reverb of the Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum. I was going to say that I’ll be looking out for future recordings from Ruth Wilhelmine Meyer but examining their discography they have a past recording, a 2018 duet with an organist, that is going straight on my to-listen list.