One of the hardest things for composers of modern music that veers between avant-garde, jazz, and modern-classical, and which at the same time has to have rhythmic patterns is having vocals as the driving force, particularly your own.
Many composers/artists fail at the task, with those that do succeed (here Julia Holter comes to mind) come up with some exquisite results.
Add to that success rarified list composer/artist Thea Grant and her latest album Water and Dreams. Using a set of vocal-based processing techniques, Grant focuses on presenting the human voice (in this case hers) as a versatile instrument, without resorting to conventional and mundane. Grant used everything – from subtle reverberations to pitch shifts without overtly crossing the boundaries into making her music ‘too electronic’.
The results of her vocal manipulations are quite staggering to say the least, creating at the same time music that is ’out there’ but at the same time music that has both a head and a tail, the one that is at the same time something listeners that need to expand their boundaries can relate to.
Water and Dreams shifts like any body of water can, and creates some lucid dreams along the way, very listenable avant-garde music, if you will.
