GRAMOPHONE Review: Malloy Octet – Original Cast Recording
It will probably come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the weird and wonderful work of Dave Molloy that this so-called ‘Chamber Choir Musical’ is an extraordinary confection. I listened to it on the same day as seeing the London premiere of his Ghost Quartet – a song-cycle about love, death, and whiskey – and with other pieces of his at the back of my mind – his ‘electropop’ Broadway hit Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 and Preludes, his psychodrama on Rachmaninov’s crisis of confidence – I felt like I was beginning to feel at home in his head. The musical language is grabby, inclusive, and yet ‘out there’ and it screams ‘all round practitioner’ – performer, composer, orchestrator; his way with text is no less virtuosic – as brilliant and witty as it is obtuse. The work is, in a word, bonkers.
Octet is entirely a cappella and as such wholly appropriate to the confusion of voices and shape-shifting bedlam of the Internet. It’s about our addiction to a technology with the power to bring us together as surely as to drive us apart. It’s about the affront to nature, human and otherwise, it’s about obsession, isolation, dependancy, it’s about the fragile boundary between reality and fantasy. Like, swipe, refresh. Check status, email, updates.
What I love about Malloy’s concept here – and his texts are drawn from a heady mix of internet comment boards, scientific debates, religious texts and Sufi poetry – is that he cuts right back to the bare bones of our basic mode of communication: words. The distinction between spoken and sung is thrown into sharp relief as only music theatre can and verbal and harmonic dexterity is where most if not all of the tension lies. It threatens to blow your mind as surely as the strident collision of voices out there in cyberspace.
Like most of Malloy’s work (and all musical theatre) there are ‘numbers’ and they behave like tracks on an album. There’s a funky (and funny) one called ‘Candy’ which brilliantly parodies the obsessive compulsive nature (and potential disorder) of gaming. Tooth decay/mind decay. There’s a rather more sinister, even scarifying, one ‘Solo’ at the heart of the piece – a viciously funny swipe (is that left or right?) at online chatting/dating. There’s a Hymn ‘Monster’ (no prizes for guessing what that is) and an hallucinatory number ‘Little God’ which attempts to address the ‘black hole’ of technological advance. And yet in ‘Beautiful’ a glimmer of the positive is expressed with the idea that for some relating to others ‘virtually’ can help them find ‘reality’ in themselves. Octet is bookended with the harmonic consonance of our relationship to the natural world in two hymns – ‘The Forest’ and ‘The Field’ (the latter a very human counterpoint) – and they are in themselves hopeful.
So I am left with the dichotomy of wanting to hear Octet again for clarity but resisting doing so because its beauty undoubtedly lies in its complexity and its impact in its unexpected ‘otherness’. To be perfectly honest I’m not entirely sure I want to hear it again – and I mean that as a compliment. It’s a one-off. I wish I’d experienced it live. But this is the next best thing: a live recording at the work’s World Premiere at Signature Theatre, New York.
