On the evidence of this, their third album, the Hasco Duo — soprano Amanda DeBoer Bartlett and guitarist Jesse Langen — bring a new perspective to the art song. At its most compelling, their collective sound is a play of opposites—of DeBoer’s clear, intimately human voice against the technologically facilitated distortion Langen brings to his guitar sound. This opposition, and the aesthetic and emotional tensions it both creates and balances, is epitomized in the duo’s performance on the 25-minute-long Basic Lands by Jonathan Sokol. The vocal part, a dramatic bit of register-leaping virtuosity in its delivery of text drawn from William Quayle’s The Prairie and the Sea, contrasts in its natural timbres and nature imagery with the guitar’s sonically abrasive and harmonically discordant interventions.
On the duo’s setting of poet Constantinos Harpending Pavellas’ “Wildflower” DeBoer Bartlett’s voice takes on a haunting poignance as she sings the childlike—because actually written by a child—words against the lush background of sustained tones from Langen’s guitar. For Luis Fernando Amaya’s Tinta Roja, Tinta Negra/Red Ink, Black Ink, DeBoer’s shouts and cries rise and fall alongside of Langen’s long-sustained sounds. The anguish of the piece is particularly brought into focus through the microtonal clashes that result as their lines weave across and through each other.
The Same Old Wonder also includes Ravi Kittappa’s Nietzsche-inspired piece Und wenn du lange in eninen Abgrund blickst…, a collision of sound poetry and extended technique for electric guitar, and Morgan Krauss’ pallid tongues, a piece for urgently spoken text and industrially distorted guitar.
Daniel Barbiero
Avant Music News 