Part of my inspiration for the idea of the suite came from a lesson where we were shown many examples of multichannel work. One that stuck to me was a composition that evoked the idea of multichannel sound in sonata form – featuring exposition, development and recapitulation. An accompanying quote read “Sound particles dissolve the rigid blocks of musical composition – the notes and their intervals – into more fluid and supple materials”. This quote was very pertinent to me in my compositional process. I wanted to apply it to my use of extended vocal technique – the idea that my microtonal, often dissonant singing was dissolving the rigid blocks of musical composition, the notes and the intervals. As I sat down to write the composition I knew I wanted to use the results of the exercise I had done a few weeks before. In my head, fervour was going to be the second section of the suite, but I decide to start working on it first as it felt the idea was the most potent, yet the most ephemeral and fleeting. I split the signal of a Prophet synth, DI and mic’d up through a delay and a reverb pedal, and doubled the track with a virtual polyphonic VST synth to create a textural bed to the piece. I then tracked what eventually amounted to 36 vocal lines over the top. I recorded from the top register to the bottom, and from the most abrasive and dissonant examples of extended vocal technique, to the cleanest and smoothest examples of straightforward singing. I felt it very accurately crystallised the notion of fervour I was trying to capture, and harked back to the idea of the sonics of encroachment due to its often carnal and bodily sounding textures. I wanted to create a lyric line to cut through the dense mix. I was inspired by the Choosing Companions portion of Meredith Monk’s opera Atlas, which used very blunt, mechanical and humorous styles of writing, yet managed to retain a real wistfulness and emotional potency. I liked this blend and wanted to write something that evoked a similar selection of feelings. The lyrics I wrote were “I’m starting to get to grips with all this bureaucracy / It’s starting to make sense to me / I respect and fear the methodology”.
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