Project: Composition for 6 individual voices a capella, integrating three different poems from the Australian poet Les Murray: The Boeotian Count, Bat's Ultrasound and Shoal.  Structured in three movements, 2 short songs flank a longer one in the middle, to be regarded as one big brush stroke concatenating different aproaches to the vocal techniques. One approach has its roots in filtered sounds; slow and gradual changes of mouth positioning create a layered phasing effect. The nature of one of the poems, using words in english that pronounce only vowels and the letter ‘r’ rightously led to this exploration which flirts with tongue positioning techniques of overtone singing.

Another approach explores the sound of the delirious in a controlled manner. It incorporates laugh-originated rhythmic textures together with dark harmonies. Nevertheless the aim is not nearly humoristic. Articulate and unusual percussive vocal sounds in combination with consonant harmonic fields accompany a fantasy mode (boeotian mode) that is used as an ever-changing modus, with some absurdistic gestural forms of ‘resolution’. The latter aproach underlines the indivuality of each singer. The piece as a whole has the option of being performed with or without an electroacoustique soundtrack, which is predominantly based on bats sounds from different species. The piece also has a ‘sister piece’ for soprano, piano and percussion entitled ...our ray, our arrow...

The following excerpt of a poem portrays the mouth positioning filtering.

Excerpt from Bat’s Ultrasound:

ah, eyrie-ire; aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array
err, yaw, row wry—aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.