“I’m concerned with embodiment and the making-real of a composers work” – Jessica Aszodi

Australian vocalist Jessica Aszodi has launched her new album, Prayer for Nil, at an event hosted by experimental violinist Jon Rose at the Peggy Glanville-Hicks house, where Rose is resident artist.

The album, which is out now on Hospital Hill Records, features four works for solo voice with electronics. The title track, Prayer for Nil, was composed by Antony Pateras. The album also includes Jeanette Little’s Mechanical Bride[ja] maser by Alexander Garsden and The Fabric of Wind by James Rushford.

Jessica AszodiVocalist Jessica Aszodi

Aszodi premiered all four works in 2014 during the Seymour Centre’s Vivid @ Seymour New Wave: Sound, and they’ve come a long way since their initial performance. The evolution of these works has even become fodder for academic research. In her essay Grains without Territory; Voicing Alexander Garsden’s [ja] Maser and the de-centralized Vocal Subject (published by Edith Cowan University in their new journal, Directions of New Music) Aszodi details the collaborative process of realising Garsden’s [ja] maser for the record. That exquisite work calls for a gamut of extended vocal techniques which Aszodi describes as “laryngeal acrobatics”. Her virtuosity and dedication to the realisation of the composers’...