Birdsong, words and sound objects: 20 years of electroacoustic and chamber works
Sargasso proudly announces the release of strange birds, a collection of chamber and electroacoustic works by Evelyn Ficarra drawn from the last twenty years. Rather than presenting a survey in the broad sense, the album has been carefully gathered as a set of pieces that speak to one another across time, with recurring materials, images and ways of listening returning in different forms.
Several preoccupations run through the programme. One is Ficarra’s long-standing fascination with sound objects: recorded environmental sounds, mechanical noises, instrumental and vocal materials, all re-heard and re-shaped in new contexts. Birdsong is one of the strongest threads. The title work strange birds (2021), made from flute, voice, electronics and field recordings collected in different countries, opens an intimate hybrid space in which bird, human, instrument and machine seem to blur into one another. At the other end of the disc, three crows (2025), created specifically for this release, returns to birds through spoken word, homemade sound sources, flute, voice and electronics, setting up a clear connection between the first and last tracks.
Another central concern is language: not only what words mean, but how they sound, how they fracture, and how they can be translated or transliterated into musical form. Three of the works draw directly on Japanese poetry and on Ficarra’s close engagement with its rhythms, syllabic structures and phonetic qualities. In Night Edge II and The Arbitrariness of Language, both connected to a poem by the medieval poet Izumi Shikibu, vowels, consonants, repetitions and rhythmic patterns become compositional material. In night bed is in mess, based on a poem from the Man’yoshu, the tensions between original text, English translation, transliteration and musical expression are allowed to remain active within the piece rather than being smoothed away.
Water is another presence moving across the album. Shakespeare’s Full Fathom Five sits early in Ficarra’s catalogue, but its imagery of shipwreck, depth and transformation continues into later works, notably the solo cello piece Submerged and the string trio with electronics vagues / fenêtres. Across these pieces, water is not treated pictorially so much as imaginatively: as a way of thinking about distance, shifting light, instability, immersion and forms that are always in motion.
Again and again, the music resists settling into fixed ground. Glissandi, sliding pitches, fractured utterance and unstable textures recur throughout the disc, creating works that are precise in construction yet open in meaning. It is a portrait not only of a composer’s range, but of a continuity of listening.
Born in California, Evelyn Ficarra divides her time between the USA and the United Kingdom. She studied at the University of Sussex and later completed a PhD in composition at the University of California, Berkeley, where live electronic improvisation became an increasingly important part of her practice. The performers gathered here represent important artistic relationships built over many years. Ficarra is currently Professor of Interdisciplinary Composition (Music) at the University of Sussex.
TRACK LIST:
1. strange birds [10:00]
Evelyn Ficarra (flute, voice, electronics)
2. Night Edge II [11:54]
Lucy Shelton (voice) – Heather Frasch (flute) – Evan Price (violin)- Leighton Fong (cello) – Myra Melford (piano)
3. The Arbitrariness of Language Mvt I: long vowels [5:12]
Richard Casey (piano)
4. The Arbitrariness of Language Mvt II: short vowels [3:29]
Richard Casey (piano)
5. Submerged [7:00]
Samuel Vincent (cello)
6. night bed is in mess [6:08]
Shie Shoji (voice) – Klio Blonz (flute) – Elena Konstantinou (piano)
7. vagues / fenêtres [13:22]
Hrabba Atladottir (violin) – Ellen Ruth Rose (viola) – Leighton Fong (cello) – Evelyn Ficarra (Electronics)
8. Full Fathom Five [3:52]
Loré Lixenberg (voice) – Dominic Saunders (piano)
9. three crows [10:58]
Valerie Whittington (spoken word) – Evelyn Ficarra (flute, voice, electronics)
CREDITS:
All works composed by Evelyn Ficarra
Performed by the artists listed above
Electronics, field recordings, and production: Evelyn Ficarra
Mastering: Dylan Beattie
Original artwork: Evelyn Ficarra
