Album: Accentus, Manoury: Inharmonies (Naïve)

The French choral-group Accentus focuses on works by Philippe Manoury, mostly based on settings of poems or, in the case of the formidable "Fragments d'Héraclite", a triple-choir setting of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus.

The result blends the suspended sensation of Feldman's "Rothko Chapel" with the more chilling sonorities of Ligeti. "Slova" employs the consonant-heavy Czech language to achieve a staccato, abstract polyphony from Daniela Langer's texts – save for the final section, which hovers with an icy calm. Elsewhere, "Trakl Gedichte" offers a suite of brooding settings of Georg Trakl poems, while "Inharmonies" itself applies ring-modulation principles to vocal frequencies.

DOWNLOAD THIS Fragments d'Héraclite; Inharmonies; Slova