“Scattered Round – Songs for Elliptical Voices” dissolves the boundaries of the song, with a combination of nine voices, feedback, movement and the body. Vocalists sing into microphones that are connected to portable speakers. Their mics pick up the sounds coming out of the speakers and retransmit them, generating feedback that is manipulated by the voalists’ gestural movements of the handheld speakers.

A ‘song’ is typically a form we can easily recognize; its meaning is not hard to understand and it can be sung or replayed again and again. These ‘songs for elliptical voices’ are very different. In language, ‘elliptical speech’ is evasive, obscure and hard to pin down. The image of the ‘ellipse’, or an elongated loop, runs through the whole work. Voices sing looping motifs, which are extended into unstable feedback loops. Rounds – the phrases and elements that, in conventional songs, repeat and overlap – become scattered and disconnected. These loops ripple further outwards, towards the audience who will have gathered in a circle within the performance space. In gear-like movements, the vocalists rotate positions from around, to amongst, to within the audience, then back around, further scattering the round of voices in physical loops. 

In addition to the abstract, tone-based focus of the vocalization, the composition also includes fragments of an ongoing poetic text collaboration with writer Fred Moten. Carrying, and performing through a wireless speaker, each vocalist performs with a ‘second self’ in an act of both manipulation and control, as well as agency and release. The drone-like ambient vocal sounds might suggest the lingering vibrations of a resonating bell, which is traditionally used to summon people together for rituals, meditation, or acts as an alarm. These elliptical voices thus enter into the social sphere, where a single voice is a voice among many, resounding and reflecting back upon the self in an endless feedback loop.

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  The work was commissioned by, and premiered at the Munch Museum in 2023 with the following billing:

  Camille Norment:
  Composer. glass harmonica, crotales, feedback, electronics, voice

  Oslo 14:  
  Guro Kverndokk, voice, handheld speaker, gestural feedback
  Gro-Marthe Dickson, voice, gestural feedback
  Hedda Hammer Myhre, voice, gestural feedback
  Åshild Bergill Hagen, voice, gestural feedback 
  Marika Schultze, voice, gestural feedback   
  Karoline Ruderaas Jerve, voice, gestural feedback
  Petter Hauglum Bermingrud, voice, gestural feedback
  ​Bendik Sells (artistic director), voice, gestural feedback

  
  
  

  EXHIBITED

  2023 Munch Museum

  
  

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