I was blown away by a video of the Brooklyn band Dirty Projectors casually playing a new song backstage. The vocal arrangement is so beautiful and complex!! Really sublime. Check it out here: LINK.
The musical trick or technique the female vocalists use in the video is called hocketing. It's where a single musical line is shared between a number of people to create an infinitely more complex and beautiful sound. You hear it everywhere from panpipe music of the Andes, to Medieval vocal Music, to the clapping patterns in flamenco. The leader of the Dirty Projectors, David Longstreth, talks about it in this video: LINK (It's a little meandering, but worth checking out).
To me, this band's insular devotion to creating new and interesting sounds gives them an air of a cult or something - in a good way! I mean, what other band would work so hard to create something so odd and beautiful? Maybe cult is the wrong word, but they do remind me of people in early 1970's who lived communally and saw their endeavors as part of a larger Utopian experiment. (There's a song on the album Bitte Orca called "Temecula Sunrise" that imagines a suburban development being taken over by an pseudo-Utopian group that lives communally). Don't they even look the part?
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