MUSICAL POINTERS:
Christopher Fox's Catalogue irraisoné , for solo voice or vocal ensemble, teeters on the edge of music. It consists of the simplest forms almost entirely drained of content and context. Of the 12 short pieces, some are unadorned speech, some simple, nursery rhyme-like melodies, some have sparse percussion accompaniments. There are no harmonies, no expansive tunes, no rhythmic complexities, very little development.

The description ‘catalogue' is appropriate: each piece seems little more than a precisely annotated index card for something of more weight, housed somewhere else. Their collection hints at an inscrutable culture, with its own rituals and strange art. This is reflected in the restricted, but crucial, concessions to variation, stark switches of parameters like factory robots executing their pre-programmed movements. The listener, as archaeologist, is invited to reconstruct something of this alien world. And only now something sinisterly familiar is traced, first through the texts, sourced from a multilingual array of guidebooks and introductions, then through the titles: ‘Patrol', ‘Scanner', ‘Outsider', Security Code'. This world hides itself behind a peculiar bureaucracy, but its threat still permeates even the most objective utterances.

EXAUDI's straight-up performances are the only way this music could work. A different performance would try to invest them with weight and significance of their own, something ridiculous, rather than leaving them as pointers to unknown objects. EXAUDI bring the disinterested commitment of the archivist or bibliographer, leaving the mystery and meaning of this music to us to uncover. 
Tim Rutherford-Johnson

GRAMOPHONE:
Here's some compositional reverse engineering. Christopher Fox describes his Catalogue irraisoné (1999-2001) as a “parallel version of the same ideas in a different form” of his evening–long Everything You Need To Know . Defining Everything itself isn't easy. Commissioned by the Ives Ensemble with a stipulation that they didn't want conventionally formatted concert music, Fox devised a living and breathing sound installation using live instrumentalists and singers. Catalogue irraisoné distils that material for vocal ensemble Exaudi as “a guide . . . like a catalogue for an exhibition of visual art” to his large work. Everything you need to know about Everything You Need To Know .

Fox's choice of text ranges from Dante and Virgil to an essay about artist Rachel Whiteread and an address by the president of Romania to the 1999 World Music Days; a puzzling compendium and, on a point of order, Metiér could have helped our comprehension by reproducing the texts. But were they omitted by design? Fox is experimenting, he says, with the distinction between song, speech and declamation, deliberately querying boundaries of comprehensibility,

and Exaudi serve these technique-stretching demands keenly. Group director James Weeks snarls, shouts, and whispers text as he stamps on the floor in rhythm, bass voice Jimmy Holliday is locked into an obsessive-compulsive melodic loop that collects new modules additively, soprano Juliet Frasier duets with “natural” singing put against her voice filtered through a megaphone, Fox himself slips between speech and stylised Sprechtimme. The surface might be disarmingly simple, sometimes serene even, but there's a deeper wisdom at play that keeps these aphoristic statements rewinding in the imagination.
Philip Clark

THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY:
Christopher Fox's a capella guidebook to his own musical installation, Everything You Need to Know (2001), is drawn from introductions to places real and imagined.

Twelve short movements (in almost as many languages) describe the architecture of Barcelona, the rivers of Hell, Corsica and Rachel Whiteread's House. Spoken, shouted, crooned and declaimed by Exaudi's voices, rarely but impactfully in dialogue, the work is by turns seductive and rude, playful, violent and gloriously low-tech. The spirit of Kurt Schwitters lives on.
Anna Picard

FANFARE:
Christopher Fox (b. 1955) is described in the liner notes as an “innately independent” composer who creates music that “draws on elements of the experimental, spectral and minimalist traditions.” Interestingly, this disc was made at the old stomping ground of Benjamin Britten, The Maltings, Snape (a name that always sounded to me like a very mysterious and ominous creature in a book by Edward Corey), in fact in the Britten-Pears Recital Room.

I found most of these pieces fairly interesting, particularly Scanner, Hanging Line, Dialodia, (which sounded very much like a piece by Meredith Monk), Triptych, Outsider (which sounds based somewhat on madrigal music), and Index, Patrol , a stamping, shouting piece performed by Exaudi's director, James Weeks, rather got on my nerves (perhaps its intention?). The spoken “pieces” Rationale, Babel , and Errata , were not devoid of humor but in the end of not very interesting to me. Most are composed for solo voice, with sopranos Julia Doyle and Juliet Fraser exemplary in their combination of perfect vocal placement, pitch, and rhythm. The brief appearance of countertenor Tom Williams showed that he has a really splendid voice. The interesting tightrope walked here between seriousness and wry humor will, I am sure, lead different listeners to hear this music and get different things out of it than I did.

Normally I say very little about the sound of the disc, but on this one, most of the time, the volume is far too low. You'll have to crank it up t hear some of these pieces, particularly the spoken word one (though Babel is meant not to be heard too clearly), while a few of the sung pieces will pierce your eardrums. Perhaps this was purposeful too. Definitely a disc worth hearing at least once, though in the end it seemed to me more a technical display by singers performing cerebral music rather than anything that is highly engrossing. But then again, perhaps that is its purpose, as well.
Lynn René Bayley