COBRACORAL (PT)

COBRACORAL is a project that entwines the voices of Catarina Miranda (Portugal), Clélia Colonna (France), and Ece Canli (Turkey). Each brings their artistic vocal practice into the coil: Miranda’s choreographic exploration of orality, Colonna’s researches into Eastern and Mediterranean polyphonic singing, and Canli’s extended vocal experiments. The resultant a cappella braid threads time into a structure that maintains the cohesion of a common pulse thru the variegated dynamics of reaction and adaptation.

Intricate hocketing, call and response, and layers of ostinati become the means with which COBRACORAL engenders their distinctive sonic texture: a latticework for the voice. While one voice may insist on a two-tone melodic fragment, another may occupy itself with the rhythmic spaces left unvoiced by the first, so that a harmonic base is constructed for the third to shimmer. COBRACORAL further explores the potential of the voice by using sound effects and gesture to amplify the aural experience, suggesting that the limits of the voice extend out into electric and corporeal realms. The movements of the body also modulate the sound, as does as an artificial echo, a delay or a pitch shift. A modern vocal trio, COBRACORAL is both electrified and electrifying.

Geometric patterns color the surface that makes up COBRACORAL, like the species of snakes from which they take their name. Each song develops its own breathing pattern: a communal rite focusing in on the movement of air, where motifs of inhalation and exhalation become systems that unfold time onto vocalized expression. A careful observation of the temporal passage of respiration, of its playful and life-sustaining dynamics, is their practice of communion. There is a common responsibility held in this spirited patchwork. Ritualistic chant, hypnagogic cycles, and contemporary vocal techniques shape the rhythmic, imagistic and narrative landscape that is COBRACORAL.

Lendl Barcelos