European premiere

“Who’s haunting who here?” asks composer and sound artist Ben Vida on the opening track of his 2023 album The Beat My Head Hit, made in collaboration with ensemble Yarn/Wire and soprano vocalist Nina Dante. Not entirely eerie, the persistent, lively ghosts of the record spring out from Vida’s voice: littering the songs with knowledge and intrigue in the form of humorous mundanity and sparkling magic realism. Poetry flows in the record. Through strict cadence and flourishes of rhythmic strangeness, Vida’s voice – amplified and duplicated harmoniously by Dante’s singing – provides a steady but unpredictable throughline in the album, broken only by gasps of breath. The duo, in tandem, sound sometimes like a sampler performed manually, with looping, delay, and reverb applied by the voices themselves – repeating and echoing off one another, machine-like yet imbued with irrevocable warmth. Beneath this vocal experimentation is the soothing and subtle playing of quartet Yarn/Wire, formed in 2005 and made up of musicians Laura Barger and Julia Den Boeron on piano, and Russell Greenberg and Sae Hashimoto on percussion. Their mastery of their instruments provide an ambiguous, hypnotic, and minimal background that give Vida’s and Dante’s voices space to blossom so poetically.

*This is a seated concert