Albums
Lizard Tongue
Created in collaboration with the composer-performer Bethany Younge, Lizard Tongue is a conversation with the stones, with the air, with the branches of trees, with the living leaves, with the water, and with the songs of creatures reimagined through the human psyche. Created at the intersection of Dante and Younge’s practices as improvising performers and as composers, the duo uses their voices, entities from the natural world, and instruments made from clay and wood in an improvisatory flow state to invoke seven narrative sonic landscapes. The sound of stones, shells, living branches, tree bark, dry grasses, clay jaguar whistles, wooden flutes and jaw harps, as well as the singing, humming, whistling, growling and grunting of the performers’ voices embody psychically-charged landscapes from the depths of the churning earth to the aetheric heavens. Released on TAK editions.
Where Ben Vida’s music has previously explored the sound of text at the outer register of electronic composition, here, in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire quartet and the vocalist Nina Dante, the voice and the words it works to inhabit are placed back at the time-scale of a song. There is a familiarity to this music’s combination of restrained melody and heightened atmosphere. It feels, softly, like it’s made by a band: piano, percussion, voice. A composition kept aloft and even by its four stewards through a simultaneity of effort. The pace, across five pieces, hurries and relaxes but never outruns or distends language. You could find a story in the words being sung, if that’s what you need…
To be an attentive listener to the world as it stands is to be saturated with language. Speech resounds through nearly every space that features human beings, whether unwanted or desired, mundane or profound. Words sit on the page and in the ear, proliferating endlessly. This superabundance has long been a point of fascination for composer and musician Ben Vida, but over the past several years it has led to a new method of music making that simultaneously exalts and interrogates the primacy of language in our sonic and cultural environments. Gently, playfully, Vida breaks down language’s hierarchy of meaning and sound until they exist in egalitarian harmony.
Oblivion Seekers is Vida’s newest album in this mode of composition, following 2023’s collaboration with new music ensemble Yarn/Wire The Beat My Head Hit. Like its predecessor, the music’s focus is on coordinated duets of spoken word in a neutral tone, the variable cadences of the words in motion creating complex internal rhythmic structures. He is joined by the voices of Nina Dante, Christina Vantzou, John Also Bennett, and Félicia Atkinson, creating a singular tone that is neither theirs nor his, fluid in its gender presentation, accent, and diction… Read more.
Vistas Furtivas – The Music of Juan Campoverde
Ecuadorian-American composer Juan Campoverde’s music is of full of deep, secretive, and lush magic. Invoking the natural world and the rawest of human emotions, this album compiles vocal chamber works, and works for guitar written for Fonema Consort by Campoverde, their long-time compositional collaborator.
Fifth Tableau
Since its founding in 2012, the Chicago-based ensemble Fonema Consort has championed music that explores the expressive capacities of the human voice. For the ensemble’s fifth anniversary, Fonema Consort presents five new works that operate at the boundary between singing and speech, speech and noise, voices and instruments.
The Essential Indexical – Early MMXVIII
Nina’s experimental vocal composition Mi cama inundada is included in this compilation album from the Indexical Series.
Pasos en otra calle
This album of music by Costa Rican composers Mauricio Pauly and Pablo Chin performed by Chicago based Fonema Consort explores the boundaries of form—where structures are endangered by the very tensions that sustain them—and of meaning—where words verge on pure sound and where musical sound is itself loosed from its conventional moorings.