I hope you
were expecting to wake up to a brand new, fully immersive psychedelic experience
based around the human voice this morning, as I clearly was, an experience
whose execution filled the child’s-puzzle-board-slot-type vacancy in my daily
repertoire like liquid sculpting material filling in an empty spot in a child’s
puzzle board, slowly, liquidly, sort of incongruously, but filling it perfectly
nonetheless. Thus Practice Chanter,
whose title does not describe me at all, buppled and pobbed at me from behind
its harmonium-shaped horn-rims, its toy piano facial features, its Casio-cheeked smile, all impish and quixotically
arranged. Indeed, Practice Chanter shuffled
to its feet like pawn shop come to life, crackles and flourishes of melody and
countermelody humming off it like conversation, an abstract concept gaining
mass and shape and shambling toward us all.
Is that
what Léonore Boulanger had in mind for us?
What was certainly in mind for the French composer
was a sense of playfulness and exploration, which shines through in every
single moment of Practice Chanter, a
wonderland of weird impulses and accidental innovations and whiplash
diversions. I’m willing to bet it’s like nothing you’ve heard before, and its
vocal intonations (none in English, thank goodness!) carry this thing to its
conclusion – and notice I didn’t add “logical” in there! Illogic is what makes
this thing hum in the appealingly alien ways it does. Like a mass of ideas
carefully sifted into categories and then mixed up again, Practice Chanter will reveal quirky new discoveries on each
subsequent listen. Take it from me, I apparently have this stuff for breakfast!
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