CD Review | Voix jetées — Paramirabo

Voix jetées

Paramirabo

ATMA Classique, 2024

Paramirabo is a Montreal-based chamber ensemble specializing in contemporary music. Their new album, Voix jetées, features five pieces, each by a different composer with his/her own distinct musical personality.

Nico Muhly’s Doublespeak is a sort of tribute to 20th-century minimalism. The violin and cello lay down a repetitive, minimalist ground and the piano and other instruments (flute, clarinet, percussion) play melodic fragments over the top. Sometimes piano and strings change roles. It’s well paced, has momentum and doesn’t drag.

Missy Mazzoli’s Still Life with Avalanche starts out with harmonica drones with high-energy melodic bursts like mini explosions. It starts quite upbeat in mood but becomes darker, more percussive and chaotic before fading out.

Keiko Devaux’s Voix jetées was intended as the third movement of a chamber opera about remembered sound, so it brings in soprano Sarah Albu to sing rather allusive and abstract text by Michael Trahan. It starts out as white noise with melodic fragments before progressively becoming more formally melodic. Both cello and voice get long, sustained lines that create an effect that is both ethereal and hypnotic.

Nicole Lizée’s Music for Body-Without-Organs is an homage to a particular genre of horror film—that of the character who must regenerate his/her organs. It starts out with a spooky take on horror film music against a minimalist riff for flute. It then gets spikier and more doom-laden, repetitive and percussive, but then morphs into a sort of danse macabre with a weirdly 1940s swing to it.

The final piece, Jared Miller’s Leviathan, was inspired by the song of the blue whale. The beginning of the piece imitates whale song transposed up several octaves. It then morphs into something clearly in the same mood but more obviously “musical.”

Paramirabo is an excellent ensemble and Sarah Albu has just the right voice for contemporary music. Each piece in their new album is worthwhile in itself, but there’s enough variety of technique and mood to sustain interest.

The recording quality is excellent, with great clarity and a very vivid 3D soundstage. The booklet has excellent notes, bios and the text for the Devaux piece. It’s available as a physical CD and digitally.