In a full house at Sala Rossa, this last Thursday January 22 was an evening of vocal communion – an echo of the currents beneath the centuries, the Mediterranean landscapes and an incredible permeability between genres, languages and techniques. A humungous spectacle crossing geographies, time and humanity.
Honouring both the sacred and profane, the ancient and contemporary, Marta Torella and Helena Ros braid stories with their voices and in their voices there is gravity – it’s a dance between a soprano and a contralto, balancing, sustaining each other, confronting the crowd. They embody the contrasts in which are crafted the threads of continuity, the siren tapestry with all the stories needed to be told and heard. There is a synchrony and kinship between the two on stage that is not even telepathic but that they seem to be made out of the same dust.
The duo from Barcelona arrives in Montréal after a good week in the US touring their most recent album “Ès pergunta” (Latency, 2024), conceptualising the inevitability of fate in this tension between human and nature. It’s a lyrical plasticity, a unification of time frames and an elastic range of techniques. Tara Relena’s music is so much about the voice, the languages, the stories and the mysticism, that the use of the electronics here are only an accommodation to the contemporary, an extra layer of gravity in a scene that is a weighty present.
Throughout the night, Ros and Torella also tell us the stories behind their own process of making this album, including the happy accidents that resulted in an extra track “Odniramat” which happened by mistakenly reverse the recorded track “Tamarindo” – being so obsessed with the energy of the fate, they learned the reversed lyrics and melodies and kept the track. Which makes me think, in their conceptual framework, how timeless time and fate themselves can be. A past stretched to infinity and back is no past anymore but continuity. It is part of the same matter.
Nevertheless, Ros and Torella are not just singing to us on a stage; they are inviting us in to really listen – they want us to hear what the sirens have to tell us about fate, which is not a very serene one. At the end of the night, they gift us a Georgian singing a cappella encore with Mingjia Chen and Linnea Sablosky, who are together on tour performing Meara O’Riley’s Hocket for two voices, an absolute must see performance as well!
