Nick Dunston: Colla Voce

Composer and bassist Nick Dunston's Colla Voce -"with the voice" -is a chamber construction which he describes as an Afro-surrealist anti-opera that operates in the concept of an individual experience, as opposed to a collective one. By that he asks, "what if the blue that I see is not that same blue that you see?" His caveat is that each listener's experience may differ.

Historical examples of this phenomenon are Igor Stravinsky's 1913 premiere of "The Rite of Spring" and Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic, 1959), both of which elicited harsh and even violent responses. Fortunately (or maybe, unfortunately) we live in an era when, according to Perry Farrell of the band Jane's Addiction, "nothing's shocking."

Dunston, best known for his work in the US with heavyweights such as Vijay Iyer, Mary Halvorson, and Tyshawn Sorey, relocated to Berlin after releasing two discs on Out Of Your Head Records, Atlantic Extraction (2021) and Spider Season (2022).

Colla Voce is a collaboration between two ensembles, the American JACK Quartet, and a second Berlin-based ensemble, and four voices—Cansu Tanrikulu, Sofia Jernberg, isabel crespo pardo, and Friederike Merz—all reworked in post-production by Dunston and producer Weston Olencki. The sounds are harsh or beautiful, depending on your perspective. The brief opener, "Ova'Churn" trades on the backward rotating sounds of The Beatles' "Paul is dead" with voices layered upon electronic manipulations of string instruments and bits of mayhem -think John Zorn's Naked City meets Teo Macero's cut-and-splice. The mechanics of the recording and processing are quite mysterious. "Nearly Turbulent" opens with the cavernous sounds of instrument scrapings shadowed by accompanied vocals then a spacey slow-motion conclusion. The brief triptych "Hydrogen," "Argon" and "Oxygen" resembles futurist sound production with mechanical vocal and instrument experiments. Did Dunston and Olencki envision the final sound before recording the strings and vocals? Or is Colla Voce a product of some surrealist automatism? Yes and no, Dunston allows the listener to decide.