This is a changeable voice, by turns tender, dry, fierce and scathing.
Surrounded by open space, without drums, Ms. Gordon — who was for 30 years a member of Sonic Youth, as well as a kind of residing conscience for the '80s and '90s generation of alternative rock, particularly its women — sings in her changeable voice, a whisper and a disembodied chant and a polite or powerful call.
ReadPlease has other features as well, such as different voices, and changeable voice speeds.
With the unabashed drama of songwriters like Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel or Björk, she writes about desires and furies so great that all nature bends to them, and she often surrounds her voice with large and changeable forces.
"As I watched this strange blue dynamo scat-singing and capering his way through Friend Like Me, I knew what I wanted for the rest of my life: to have a million voices, to be endlessly changeable, to make people laugh".
And it leaves enormous room for making incorrect assumptions about what a voice, that most fragile and changeable of instruments, will be able to do five years down the road, even though singers and companies tend to be flexible when it comes to breaking contracts.
Rosa Passos, one of the most gifted bossa nova singers and guitarists to have come along in the style's 50-year life, uses a tiny, fine-featured voice; as it ranges around the changeable stresses in bossa-nova guitar rhythm, it makes you listen rigorously.
Monk's many-sided art was rooted in her voice — a ruggedly beautiful, piercingly expressive, ever-changeable instrument, which cut to the core of emotion while largely bypassing language.
As in Tool, that music can involve changeable meters, evolving structures and complex patterns, but Mr. Keenan's voice — a desolate croon that seethes underneath — is always at its center.
It may be nothing new to find Mr. Williams, who provides the voice of a big blue Genie with a manic streak, working in a wildly changeable vein.
Ms. Andersson remains the band's changeable focus point: she writes obscurely politicized lyrics that speak to power relations of all kinds and makes her voice an imperious chant patterned unevenly over the beat, or an aggrieved whine somewhere between Bjork and Kim Gordon; sometimes her brother alters it beyond recognition in pitch or texture.
