EXAUDI: four composers, no lynchpin, one ensemble

EXAUDI's Pocket Universe has no thesis. Four composers, four pieces, four very long spans of unaccompanied voices under James Weeks, and none of them reaching for the same thing. What makes it a record rather than a concert programme is the ensemble itself: the same mouths, the same tuning, the same willingness to sit inside a chord until it stops being static and turns into an event.

The discography starts in 2005 with A Glimpse of Sion's Glory and Maldon & Other Choral Works, and has been steady since: Ben Somewhen in 2007, then La Terre est un homme and Musique de chambre, cantates in 2018, Forms of Complaint in 2020, Trostlieder in 2022, parallaxis forma in 2023, Voices in 2025. A working ensemble's shelf rather than a star conductor's. Weeks has built the group around the repertoire and not the other way round, and this is the record where that pays.

The four works were commissioned for EXAUDI's annual EXPOSURE programme between 2013 and 2019 and gathered on NMC Recordings, out in September. So it plays as an archive with a good ear, not as a concept album. Miller's Guide takes Maria Muldaur's 1968 recording of the hymn 'Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah' as its source. Hamilton sets the Irish Proclamation of the Republic. Chadburn went through 700 mid-century postcards and musicalised 30 of them. Hannan went to Galileo and Newton.

Guide opens the record and takes its time. A solo voice states the hymn, then the ensemble arrives and pulls the line apart from all sides, swooping melodies sliding past each other over harmony that stays broadly tonal. The changes are small enough that you hear them a beat after they happen. Then the ending: the singers drop out one by one until there is nothing at all.

Hamilton's Proclamation of the Republic is the one that moves. Set to the document itself, it is playful rather than solemn, resting on unexpected silences, phrases repeated until they misbehave, sudden outbursts and arpeggio runs that sound like showing off and get away with it. Spoken word sits low under the sung lines. Here the ensemble's rhythmic finesse is the whole point, and their timing is vicious.

Chadburn's Affix Stamp Here is the still one. Thirty postcards out of 700, their messages musicalised: holiday thoughts, mundane thoughts, whatever people wrote home about in the middle of the last century. The setting is drone-backed and mostly solo, even wistful, the choir receding to a hum that holds the air in place. It could be dull and is not, because the material is so small that any movement registers as an event. Closer to conceptual art than to tune.

Hannan's title piece closes it with 18:42 of pepper and turns. Galileo and Newton supply the texts, and the music answers with harmony that bites and rhythm that folds back on itself. It is the most labyrinthine of the four and the most fervent, the point where the group sounds less like a choir and more like one instrument with a lot of breath.

None of this belongs on shuffle. Pocket Universe is for the contemporary choral crowd, the NMC regulars, and anyone who keeps a Meredith Monk record filed next to their drone records. Play it in order, at night, loud enough that the room joins in. If you need a hook in the first ninety seconds, this is not your record.

The flaw is that nothing here is a lynchpin. Four composers, four worlds, nothing binding them but the ensemble. And Guide's fade to silence, so effective on its own, puts a full stop at the top of the record: the next three pieces have to restart the engine from nothing. Chadburn's postcards are the other soft spot, a piece where the concept does more work than the music. Even so, as a survey of what a good ensemble can do with four unrelated commissions, this earns a 4. The singing is exact throughout, the programming is brave, and the best of it, Guide's slow unraveling and Hamilton's restlessness, is worth sitting still for.

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