Roomful Of Teeth: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Mix a bit of yodeling with Tuvan throat singing, add in a pinch of Sardinian cantu a tenore, fold in compositions from cuttingedge composers and you have the vocal group Roomful of Teeth. This eightvoice ensemble, which includes the 2013 Pulitzer Prizewinning composer Caroline Shaw, is gleefully dismantling the traditional definition of ensemble singing right before our ears (and teeth ). Musical descendants of the innovative extended vocal techniques of Meredith Monk, the Teeth tend to make sounds some sweet, others alarming that you probably haven t heard from a group of humans. In Australian composer Wally Gunn s The Fence is Gone, verses emerge from an infrastructure of ohha syllables and a simple drum pulse, ending with women s voices, tight in harmony, like a chord from a Casio keyboard. In Rinde Eckert s Cesca s View, imagine a lonely cowgirl on some windswept plain. Estelí Gomez gets her yodel on, beautifully, while the three other women vocalize in close, barbershopstyle harmony. It