Dim Dark Venta was the piece where I wanted to feature the vocals the most. Not necessarily in very diverse ways, but I wanted to vocals to be the main thing standing out about this piece.
But in taking space for the vocals I also wanted to give space to the full sound of the "instrumental" band.
I liked the idea of a dramaturgical arch of taking the vocals out completely in the middle part of the song, and also to place the lyrics and parts with no lyrics strategically like a layered onion: No lyrics - lyrics - fully instrumental solos - lyrics - no lyrics.
Most recognizable as a pure vocal-feature is of course the intro of the piece, where for almost two minutes, there are no other instruments than the four voices. It starts off with the four vocalists alone with lyrics, but transforms quickly into a web of interwoven melodies of the voices that circle around each other, making it almost impossible for the listener to discern which voice is which (Example 1). Helping that "confusion" is that two middle voices in this part are always a minor second apart from each other, making the whole chord structre sound dissonant (purple bordered excerpt). There I also utilized working with specific vowels. I used the vowel "ah" with a harder attack (almost a glottal stop, but without that percussive element of the actual stop). This was to emphasize the bell structures I used in the first 8 bars. After those first 8 bars, the voices upen up more, changing their notes at different spaces, making the cycle sound even more diffused and hazy.
The voices go on transforming into a cyclic movement in three-part harmony, but I tried to write the melody in a way that it almost seems as if one voice was singing one long melody (Example 2).
The solos in Dim, Dark, Venta are kept very instrumental. I deliberately didn't include the voices in these two parts to give it a more classical jazz instrumental feel, even though of course the music itself is not traditional sounding like jazz at all. But making it a tenor-sax and piano solo felt more like going into a traditional big bang style, and I decided to give some room to the music by not including all the sections.
After the soli, the tempo changes drastically and we get to a kind of transitional interlude that guides the listener into the last act of the piece, a slow, symphonic sounding reprise of the verses before. In this very slow interlude, the vocals are the only harmonic anchor given to this structure, where the vocals are singing whole notes, very closely blended together, almost trying to imitate a synthesizer pad (Example 3). They sing on an open "ah" vowel, barely attacking the note, in contrast to how the "ah" sound was used in the intro for the dissonant web of melodies, where it was very important for the attack of the "ah" to be as hard as possible, so especially the bell sounds in the first 8 bars would stand out enough.
I wanted to end the piece very similarily to how I started it, with the voices by themselves (Example 4).
I picked up the motif I used in Example 2 and adapted it rhythmically to the new, slower tempo. The voices also had chord symbols in their parts and started off the outro with the rhythm section still playing. The goal was to start the outro with an improvisation over the changes, but with having the original melody in mind. Then slowly, one repeat after the other, they move closer and closer to the original melody, and next to them, the rhythm section slowly drops out as well. The last repeat is the voices alone again, ending the piece in solitude.
