In Resonance With Elsewhere

Composer-performer & visual artist Charlotte Hug: Shaman of contemporary music.
Reflections on her solo-album «In Resonance with Elsewhere»
This fourth solo album by Charlotte Hug presents the distilled version of a composition commissioned by the Ruhrtriennale in 2022. On that occasion, Hug performed in a huge former machine hall and created various acoustic-imaginary spaces with Son-Icons (expansive Visual-Music on semi-transparent paper, usually painted on both sides with both hands and long brushes; these form the centrepiece of Charlotte Hug’s work), with video projections and a staged setting.
The process of capturing this intermedia work on an audio recording was fascinating. Charlotte Hug decided to do the recording in a large hall with an elaborate arrangement of microphones in order to convey the rich spatial quality of the original performance. The result is a multidimensional listening experience that offers a palpable sense of the physical energy, the movement and the dance inherent in Hug’s performance.
This album, ‘In Resonance with Elsewhere’, places a greater emphasis, for the first time, on the artist’s voice. Whereas in the earlier albums, the viola was the foundation on which the vocal artistry was built, now the voice is the centre of attention. Charlotte Hug has developed her voice to impressive effect in recent years. Ranging over four octaves, she takes us with her into frenzied chasms, cooing, groaning, giggling and twittering. Like a shaman, as she breathes in and out, she conjures the ebb and flow of the seas (‘Tides’), invoking nature. With her polyphonic singing, a hybrid oscillation between near and far, this side and the other side. Opera-like passages are then added (‘Imagina 2’), perfectly intoned, performed as bright as a bell. Hug LISTENS. She is in perfect resonance with the sounds she produces – although the question arises as to where they come from – from ‘elsewhere’?
‘Blanc’, on the other hand, which begins with a grandiose, witty viola intro, is joined by a virtuoso, feverishly glittering vocal cascade and finally emerges into barking, whinnying, nasal and archaic vibrating passages – influenced by Chinese Kun Qu opera – is staggeringly funny. It goes without saying that Charlotte Hug could imitate an entire zoo with her voice. But that is not the point, nor is it about appropriating exotic singing techniques. Rather, the focus here is on the desire to resonate with the ‘other’. This is exemplified in ‘Mormorio dei muri’. For this piece, during an international artist residency programme in Italy, Hug asked her fellow artists and scholars to speak in their respective languages to a person who was important to them and who has left this world. She transformed the recordings of these ‘conversations with the dead’ into an audio piece that reveals a completely new side to her as an artist: she is not the performer here, but a devoted master presiding over a Dance of Death.
‘Voices found’, the only piece by Charlotte Hug that does not feature a viola, is an ode to the human voice, which sometimes no longer sounds like Charlotte Hug, but comes from ‘elsewhere’. Loosely based on a Heinrich Heine quote from Schumann’s ‘Dichterliebe’, this piece consists of ringing and droning, murmuring and voices talking. Here we are introduced to the full range of Hug’s vocal artistry, as several tracks are superimposed on one another, thus enabling an even more immersive experience. The reciprocal processes of music and the Spatial-Scores with Son-Icons. which are so important in Hug’s work, are reflected here to an intense degree. In the last piece, ‘Re-Enchanting’, we encounter a star-like luminosity, a celestial polyphony of voice and viola. Then suddenly a tremor, from the depths, taking hold of us in waves – an archaic force. That a string instrument can sound like this, that a human voice has this power! And then the music resounds again, at the very highest pitch, from another world, into which we immerse ourselves one last time before the magic is over.

Annelis Berger, music journalist, February 2025
Liz Kilburn, translation