Featured Artists Announced For 7th Resonant Bodies Festival

"In equal measures intelligent, playful, ambitious and moving, the program illuminated the shape-shifting power of the human voice." That intoxicating New York Times review of the inaugural Resonant Bodies Festival in 2013 marked its arrival as an immediately valuable contributor to the city's music scene.

The festival has since evolved into something akin to New York Fashion Week for the new music set, offering a chance for buck-the-trendsetters to experience the high-energy epicenter of experimental vocal music. The flagship festival returns to Roulette this September 3-5, kicking off the concert season with three fast-paced nights of vocal luminaries and artistic renegades converging in the best "see and be seen" creative energy New York has to offer.

"We bring together people who light each other up," said festival founder Lucy Dhegrae. "The palpable camaraderie among the nine featured artists - many of whom have never met - creates an incredible energy, and that transfers to the audience. The level of artistry, the distinctive projects, the flow between pools of sound - audiences can expect an unforgettable concert experience, unlike anything else in the world."

As improbable as it may seem, Dhegrae tends not to speak in hyperbole. The festival's unique value is built around its artist-driven programming, in which vocalists are given carte blanche to program adventurous music about which they are truly passionate. This artistic license means audiences have the chance to see such wildly disparate aesthetics as an operatic legend performing in drag, a duo weaving ASMR and 80s power ballads, and a mysterious vocalist Dhegrae described as "an ineffable arctic fox."

"For audiences, ResBods provides a snapshot of the most innovative, compelling, and original work happening in the contemporary vocal world," said Dhegrae. "For singers, who are so often 'hired guns' selected to embody the creative aesthetic of a director or conductor, it's a chance to be seen as an artist with a vision of their own, and not just as a conduit for the music of others."

This curatorial control leads to committed and inspired performances across an array of stylistic atmospheres. The 2019 festival will feature three compact 30-minute sets each night, intended to serve as an intriguing aural tasting menu.

Charmaine Lee, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Jane Sheldon

On Tuesday, September 3, the "lyrical, brutal, and funny" Charmaine Lee(Bomb Magazine) joins longtime collaborator Conrad Tao to present a new work employing site-specific spatialization, live signal processing, and fixed media to explore a variety of sonic environments - each a meditation on both the mechanical and human qualities of vocal and electronic sound. Their collaboration is a celebration of hybridity, weaving together diverse influences from ASMR, drone, free improvisation, ambient, and the 80s power ballad. Charismatic countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, whose "Glass Handel" interdisciplinary installation was praised by Opera News for its "joyous hoopla and questing innovation," will turn his gift for spectacle inward, featuring his operatic collaborations in an intimate set for voice and piano. Jane Sheldon, known for her "command of pure and profane vocal sounds" (Audrey Journal), will bring experimental stagecraft developed through her work with Sydney Chamber Opera to an original monodrama, poem for a dried up river, based on poetry by Alice Oswald.

Anaïs Maviel, Kate Soper, Ted Hearne

The festival continues on Wednesday, September 4, with transportive vocalist Anaïs Maviel, presenting this year's only completely solo set, with multi-layered stories woven among threads of the subconscious and vocal improvisation, told with her custom-made 14-string kamale n'goni. Pulitzer Prize finalist Kate Soper, who has been hailed by The Boston Globe as "a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power" and by The New Yorker for her "limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and mastery of modernist style," will return to the festival to share her new "Fragments of Parmenides" and explore "Musical Dialogues," improvisations with Wet Ink ensemble member Sam Pluta. Ted Hearne, whose work has been praised by Pitchfork as "some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory - from any genre" will preview a new song cycle commissioned by Carnegie Hall, which sets Dorothea Lasky's fearlessly frank yet seductively prophetic poetry collection AWE, and will be accompanied by Bang on a Can All-Stars member Ashley Bathgate.

Stephanie Blythe as Blythely Oratonio, Arooj Aftab, Erin Gee

The festival's closing night on Thursday, September 5, will feature world-renowned mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, whose bearded drag persona Blythely Oratonio will deliver a "bold and bawdy" (Opera News) musical mash-up of disco, rock, and opera. Arooj Aftab, presented by NPR as one of the best composers under 40, will meld liquid vocals with the dreamscapes of collaborators Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily in an improvised journey that blends jazz, indie rock, and Sufi minimalism. Erin Gee, cited by The New Yorker's Alex Ross as one of the most influential composer-vocalists of the 21st century, will close out the 2019 festival with a new multimedia collaboration with the Argento Ensemble, plus solo pieces from her legendary series "Mouthpieces," which uses intricate and subtle vocal sounds to create a haunting breath-based landscape.

"Resonant Bodies audiences tend to be curious, eclectic, and open to the voice as this intangible, all-encompassing expression of our humanity," said Dhegrae. "They could find themselves riveted, challenged, ecstatic, and transported over the course of a single set. They might leave with a new obsession. The only emotional state they're genuinely unlikely to experience is boredom."

www.resonantbodiesfestival.org

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