Chicago’s bustling new-music community usually focuses on instrumental material—while there are a number of excellent, boundary-pushing singers in town, most ensembles don’t tackle vocal music. Over the past four years or so, that’s made Fonema Consort distinctive and important: the local group, directed by composer Pablo Chin, emphasizes adventurous new work that centers the human voice, even if the sounds those voices contribute don’t usually sound very songlike. On Friday, Fonema Consort releases its second album, Fifth Tableau, on Chicago cassette imprint Parlour Tapes, and on Saturday it celebrates the occasion with a concert at Experimental Sound Studio.
Young’s visceral “Master of Disguises” also deploys wordless vocal lines—piercing screeches and gurgles—alongside simpatico instrumental flourishes (including rheumy bass clarinet and snorting tenor saxophone, both of which borrow extended techniques from free improvisation) and the manipulation of handheld cassette players (not just prerecorded material being played, rewound, or fast-forwarded but also the sounds of tapes being inserted, ejected, and stopped). Toward the end Dante gently sings a quotation from the Kelly Link short story “The Girl Detective.” Mercer’s “Octoid,” the lone nonvocal work here, is a veritable smorgasbord of prepared piano, with Daniel Walden playing composed lines at the keyboard while three other members busy themselves with the instrument’s internal mechanisms.
