If you had gone wandering along North Mississippi Avenue in Portland, Oregon, on a Sunday morning a couple of years ago, as you strolled past Taquería Por Que No on your way up to Mississippi Records, you might have heard the muffled sounds of singing filtering through the walls of a white clapboard building. The sound came not from one of the neighborhood’s storefront houses of worship, however, but from inside Beacon Sound, a community-minded record store where, for a year or so, the composer Peter Broderick assembled a few dozen people to break bread and sing together—a kind of secular service, like church without the praying.
Broderick has a serious pedigree: He’s a member of the Danish chamber-indie group Efterklang as well as Kill Rock Stars’ indie-folk band Horse Feathers, and his own releases have appeared on labels like Erased Tapes (home to Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds) and Simon Raymonde’s Bella Union; he recently published his first volume of sheet music for solo piano. Beacon Sound, despite its down-to-earth profile—its Facebook page is pretty evenly split between store news, activism, and local politics—puts out heavy hitters like Terry Riley and Jóhann Jóhannsson on its in-house label.
But the Beacon Sound Choir is an amateur affair that welcomes singers “regardless of musical experience.” Portland singer-songwriter Alela Diane is a member, and so is Broderick’s sister Heather Woods Broderick, also a member of Horse Feathers and Efterklang, but it’s immediately apparent from the ensemble’s swollen tones that this is no professional choir. On the group’s first recording, a 10” on the Berlin/Glasgow label Infinite Greyscale, they didn’t even sing words. Hence the title, Sunday Morning Drones: After coffee and chitchat, with the group standing in a circle, one singer would strike a note and the rest would gradually join in, first in unison and eventually moving up and down the scale before finally coming back to the root note together.
The results of that record were transportive—at once monolithic and vaporous, with nebulous clusters of frequencies and overtones swirling in mid-air like murmurations of starlings. They continue those drone experiments in one song on this short but captivating album, and on the side-long “Sea of Voices,” a remix by the Dutch electronic musician Machinefabriek, their wordless singing is stretched and smeared into a 16-minute opus reminiscent of Stars of the Lid. On the rest of the record’s songs, the group has graduated to actual lyrics, but the project remains an informal, proudly untutored affair.
The sound is thick with the atmosphere of its untreated room. Heavy with natural reverb, footsteps, and the occasional cough or cleared throat, it sounds a lot like a rainy day spent indoors. The opening “Spring Song,” a playful, close-harmonized ode to the end of winter, begins with someone counting off the beat and snapping fingers in time, and it ends with a flurry of giggles. Wind chimes tinkle quietly in the background of “Drone 3,” and if you listen closely to “Can’t Wrap My Head Around It”—a collision of Philip Glass or Meredith Monk and ragged Appalachian folk—you might briefly make out the gurgling of an infant’s coo.
Despite the music’s traditional feel—some pieces sound almost medieval, while others resemble camp meeting songs’ melodies—all were written specifically for the group by members of the choir. “The Perpetual Glow” is a simple lullaby, kind of a psychedelic take on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” (”Weeping stars go flying/On their way to play/You’ll catch a ride and fly out/To the heavens of your mind,” runs the first verse) for which Broderick devised a basic notation system to enable non-musicians to read the music. “Spring Song” is the result of a songwriting exercise in which the choir broke into three groups, each of which wrote one verse before coming back together to sing the whole song. The final verse perfectly encapsulates its off-the-cuff origins: “Winter’s over/Moods are lifting/Let it glow/I don’t know.”
A few songs are mere fragments, like rehearsal sketches, and these, too, are likely to break off into murmurs. “I completely forgot where—I had a melody in my head!” exclaims a voice in “Watermelon Sugar,” interrupting a soft, wordless chord, and bringing the song to a premature close. No one seems to mind; we hear chuckles, a smattering of applause, and another voice saying, “I loved that so much!”
All these imperfections are part of the record’s charm—particularly the frequent laughter, perhaps because it’s such a palpable reminder of the actual physical joy of making music, particularly singing music, with other people. But the singers can command more serious moods, too. Slipping between major and minor keys, “Fortunate Ones” (written by Holland Andrews, aka Like a Villain) sounds faintly like Georgian polyphony; its somber tones are as rich as the smell of incense. “We are the fortunate ones/Who get to be whole again,” they sing; it is a kind of psalm whose open-ended meaning could just as easily apply to the act of singing itself.
