Marina Herlop / Voice Actor

The future began when Marina Herlop sat down at the computer. After two albums of intricate piano impressionism and wondrous vocal techniques, the classically trained singer and pianist sampled her voice and piano with software, innovatively enough that music journalism couldn’t help but draw comparisons to pioneers like Björk or Meredith Monk. Pitchfork, the Gault Millau of music criticism, conjured up an entire future world in reviewing Herlop’s third album “Pripyat,” which the 31-year-old from Barcelona released last year on the Berlin avant-garde electronic label PAN. Named after the abandoned, nuclear-ravaged city in Ukraine, “Pripyat” teems with metronomic synthesizer surfaces and deconstructed beats and tones. Herlop sings over it in her own invented language, layering multiple vocal lines and creating choral pop songs of otherworldly beauty. She now performs these live, analog and polyphonic with a four-piece ensemble at Summer Festival. The evening will begin with Noa Kurzweil’s remarkable project Voice Actor in a solo audio video concert. The duo’s debut album “Sent From My Telephone” (Stroom, 2022) is a four-and-a-half-hour sound panorama made of voice messages, crashing noise, loops, ambient surfaces and folky vocals.