Review of Ann Lee’s Testament with Danielle Bloomberg and Amanda Seyfried – Screams, Bells and Bruised Beauty | Experimental music

A A few days ago, Amanda Seyfried was on Graham Norton’s sofa alongside Strictly’s Margot Robbie and Johannes Radebe. Tonight, the Mean Girls, Les Misérables and Mamma Mia star sits among a different group of superstars: key figures from London’s avant-garde jazz scene.

The link here is to composer Daniel Blomberg. When he accepted an Oscar last year for his extraordinary score for The Brutalist, Blomberg chose the name Otto’s Café, the Dalston venue whose impromptu musicians have long been a cornerstone of his work. While scoring The Testament of Ann Lee — a biopic starring Seyfried as the founder of the Shaker religious movement — Blomberg was struck by the similarities between Shaker worship and free improvisation: the shared ascetic intensity, the cult-like devotion, and the moments of wild, euphoric release. I realize that the speaking-in-tongues qualities of Shaker devotional singing have strange echoes in the work of vocal improvisers like Phil Minton and Maggie Nichols, both of whom appear in the film—and in this performance.

Seyfried, a fine musician (as anyone who’s seen her play the dulcimer on Jimmy Fallon’s show will know), sings Shaker-style hymns that Bloomberg wrote for the film. Her voice—pure, anthemic, lightly infused with Appalachian bends—serves as a melodic anchor while the rest of Bloomberg’s eight-piece band skewers these songs. Violinist Billy Steiger and bassist Tom Wheatley (on what appears to be a six-stringed violin) smear the melodies with scratchy drones. Drummer Steve Noble extracts abrasives from the drum; All players ring discordant hand bells, as if summoning the dead.

If the carols in the film are cheerful, communal anthems like Wicker Man, binding the congregation together, here they take on a brutal, unsettling edge. A lot of that goes back to Minton and Nichols. Minton – a youthful-looking 85-year-old – unleashes his vast arsenal of sound effects: gasps, spasms, howls, gasps and animalistic neighs. Nichols punctuates the chants with screams, screams, and sudden explosions of joy. They mirror, then strangely exaggerate, the ecstatic tongues of the shakers.

What emerges is not accompaniment but confrontation: faith is rubbed with improvisation, beauty is deliberately wounded. Seyfried holds her ground throughout, unflinching amid the vocal sabotage, less a Hollywood interventionist than a fully integrated participant. The result – despite being only 45 minutes in total – is both exhilarating and wonderfully disconcerting.