Sidsel Endresen - One

Sofa
521

It’s unfair perhaps, but solo vocal albums have a tough row to hoe with me and this one is no exception. I wasn’t familiar with Sidsel Endresen’s work prior to this though that’s certainly more my omission than anything as she’d released as many as 14 previous solo albums including a few on ECM.

Here, she presents ten fairly brief pieces for unenhanced solo voice, simply numbered 1-10. The first song is quite nice, actually, using mostly breath tones and “wind-like” effects; it’s haunting, concentrated and very present. Following this is one that seems more representative of Endresen’s work, a construction of plosives and glottal eructations, kind of a softer Phil Minton at his most gastrointestinal. What she does, she does expertly but too often for my taste it’s just an elaboration of this or that technique, a Jaap Blonk without the humor. She is subtle and tends to keep things on a low boil—no fits of banshee wailing to be found, thank goodness—but there’s a feeling of sketchiness, perhaps intentional. Whereas an Ami Yoshida will investigate an area at length, not only wringing out of it undreamt of riches but also, crucially, placing these sound in space with (often) an inspired sense of poetry, Endresen seems content to merely catalog the sounds for the most part though, on occasion, as in the aforementioned opening track as well as #8, she reaches richer territory. On the latter, she constructs a coarse language that I’m guessing is her own (someone slap me if it’s an existing tongue) and unspools a stressful but contained harangue that’s taut and unnerving, evoking early Galas. I could have listened to much more in this vein.

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