Vocal lone wolf

The focus of this year's Ultrasound Festival is the voice in all its variations of meaning - be it as a singing or speaking voice, as a suppressed political voice or the voice at the ballot box. At least that's what the program says. So it is only logical that the Swiss vocal poet Mischa Käser also makes an appearance. Unfortunately, the timing of the program is somewhat unfortunate, as the festival theme plays no role at all directly before Käser's vocal performance. Instead, the Ensemblekollektiv Berlin, which consists of the Ensemble Adapter, the SonarQuartett, the Ensemble Apparat and the ensemble mosaik, will premiere a new work by Canadian composer Marc Sabat. Anyone interested in Sabat's instrumental intonation experiments in a large ensemble format is unlikely to stay late into the night on weekdays to listen to a solo vocal poet, so Käser has to play to a sparsely populated audience in the large hall of the Heimathafen. It would probably have been better to combine the Swiss singer with the Irish vocal artist Jennifer Walshe.

Unimpressed by the small number of visitors, Mischa Käser offers a highly concentrated, clear and precise performance of great power. His program Lavawhich dates back to 2010, can be changed and adapted for every occasion. It consists of a multitude of vocal miniatures that are strung together like songs in a music set, separated by brief moments of relaxation.
For the subject area in which Käser will be working in his program, this is true Prelude in which the artist enters the stage wearing a dimly lit hat fitted with many jumbled music boxes. These run out and only one melody remains: "Sandman, dear Sandman ..." Even if you can't hear the words, they and their meaning resonate in your head.
How content, meaning, form and sound are connected is impressively demonstrated by the next miniature Speech for M. In it, Käser uses nonsense sounds in a virtuoso manner. At first, this form of non-language use seems irritating and alienating. But if you allow yourself to get involved, the melody, posture and gestures also convey enough content in ways other than the usual and are capable of telling a whole story. Käser's "speech", for example, is, as becomes clear between the lines, a lecture on the use of voice and language techniques. The content level, which is normally conveyed, is missing - but everything else remains, showing like a kind of X-ray image what makes up a lecture in addition to the content, and focusing attention on what actually forms the skeleton of communication. Mischa Käser also works with this level of communication in the other compositions he presents in Lava presented. At the same time, he demonstrates his body as a vocal instrument with all its facets: the sometimes flowing, sometimes choppy breath, the lungs, the stomach and the chest, the larynx, the diaphragm, the tongue, the teeth, the mouth. He impresses in Srrrrrrit and Yoooo by precisely repeating individual nonsense sound phrases several times, thus emphasizing the musical level of speaking. At the same time, he uses the entire range of his voice here, from high chirps to dark impulses from the depths of the abdomen. The rhythmic play of the entire muscular apparatus associated with this is almost like a dance.
In his program, Käser also sheds light on the moods and passions conveyed by the voice, from aggression to tenderness. And the difference between different languages also plays a role. This is how Käser sounds in the Hommage à Marina Tsvetaeva suddenly soft and gentle like Russian poetry.
His last piece Allegro man troppo, Andante sostenuto uses a variety of non-verbal means to tell the story of a babbling man who tries to articulate something but doesn't quite succeed. Unperturbed, he starts again and again, until he is harshly snubbed by an impatient counterpart: That's enough! - The story of the rejection of a vulnerable person trying to understand, which Käser shows here, is touching in a peculiar way and echoes painfully for a long time.

The audience in the Heimathafen paid tribute to the exhausted cheesemaker after this impressive vocal performance with long-lasting applause.