CD Review | i love evil, Dory Hayley, Red Shift Records

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i love evil 

Dory Hayley, soprano

Red Shift Records, 2025

i love evil is a two-CD set of recordings. The first CD contains Morton Feldman’s monumental Three Voices. This is a 67-minute work for soprano with the same singer, Dory Hayley, interacting live with two recordings of herself performing other parts of the same piece. The second CD contains four shorter pieces by contemporary composers inspired by Feldman and using the same forces—i.e. Hayley x 3.

Three Voices spins out the text “Who’d have thought that snow falls/snow whirled nothing ever fell,” or fragments of it, for more than an hour. The words are taken from “Wind” by Frank O’Hara and apparently refers to a child and a teddy bear observing a snowglobe. The text doesn’t really make an appearance until around the 27-minute mark. Up to that point it’s layered monosyllables with constantly changing timbre, pitch, tempo and density. I think it’s strictly a remix. I don’t think the recorded voice has been electronically altered, so the ability to produce so much complexity is fairly remarkable. 

For the second half hour or so we get different treatments of the text and fragments of it with lots of variation in colour and density. The final 10 minutes or so provide a kind of resolution with a reprise (or close to it) of some of the opening section followed by a riff on the text in which words disappear in the repetitions until we fade out on “snow falls.” For a long electronic work, it sounds surprisingly natural, with the three voices undistorted in the church acoustic of St. Paul’s Anglican in Vancouver. It’s a challenging piece for both the singer and the listener, but it has a kind of hypnotic attraction.

Jordan Nobles’s XYZ is a 10-minute piece that started out as a video project with each monosyllabic vowel being accompanied by a close-up of Hayley’s face. For audio, some extra syllables have been added and it’s multi-tracked with quite a lot of abstraction of the voice and fairly extreme spatialization.

Katerina Grimon’s Shadow/Light sets three of her own poems written during lockdown for multi-tracked soprano and live electronics. “Storm and Silence” is heavy on the electronics with ethereal vocals. It’s pretty dense. By contrast, “Time Soup” is quite percussive with a repeated hammering on the text “I think.” The vocals are high and bright and overall it’s very spatialized. It’s very rhythmic in places but becomes more chaotic. “New Light” is different again. It’s quite gentle and lyrical, evoking waves.

Rodney Sharman was a pupil of Feldman’s. His Scenes from Macbeth takes sections of the witches’ text and sets them for multi-tracked soprano using voice and body percussion. The four movements are a mix of long melismatic lines and more declamatory sections, all accompanied by body percussion and electronic effects. It, too, was recorded at St. Paul’s but it sounds more like a studio recording than the Feldman.

The final piece is perhaps the most strange. It’s Cassandra Miller’s How weird he must think the world is. Quite long at 21 minutes, it takes as its starting point the singer imitating a recording for banjo and vocals. There are multiple takes, while the singer’s thoughts about the piece and the process are recorded between takes. The whole thing is then broken up, heavily processed and recombined. Sometimes it’s almost melodic, sometimes conversational, sometimes squeaky and high-pitched—and, at one point, it sounds like the death rattle of someone being strangled. Hayley imagines what it must sound like to her baby. Hence the title!

All the recordings were made in 2020. The Feldman and Sharman were made at St. Paul’s, the rest in the Telus Studio Theatre at UBC. The engineering is excellent—and needs to be. The recording is being released as a physical two-CD set, as an MP3, as standard resolution lossless digital and on streaming platforms. I listened to 441kHz/16bit digital.

This is really quite an extraordinary achievement by Hayley and her collaborators. I can’t imagine the pieces being performed better, but not everyone will be up for two hours of multi-tracked soprano and electronics!

This page is also available in / Cette page est également disponible en: Français (French)