Few artists have expanded the possibilities of the voice as radically and masterfully as Berlin based voice artist, composer and improvisor Ute Wassermann. For her, the voice is an ecosystem: a living field of relationships between body, object, space, and the listener’s ear. Her music moves between the transcendental and the quotidian at once – breath as ritual, sound as touch, acoustic experience as something simultaneously otherworldly and utterly present. Dissolving the perceived boundaries between mind and body, she offers instead a full-bodied immersion in ever-changing stillness, an idiosyncratic engagement with sound that is all-at-once fierce, tender, and free.

On her new album “chimeric”, Wassermann extends her voice with a wide array of implements; breath-driven drums, hydrophones used as throat microphones, bird whistles, jaw harps, brass megaphones. These objects don’t just function as embellishments or demonstrations, but rather, as companions – materials with which she communicates and is herself transformed. The result is a music in which the lines between self, object, and environment are constantly blurred, erased and redrawn.

Across six pieces, Wassermann’s voice moves with uncanny immediacy: lips smacked, gurgles roared, harmonic tails snapping through space. Recorded with a striking spatial presence – using stereo microphone placement that allows sound to shift with the smallest movement – the listener is placed almost between the ears of the performer, inside the throat’s resonant chambers as it flickers from whisper to warning, from animal cry to sculptural multiphonic bloom.

What emerges is not theatrical representation but embodiment: a confrontational tenderness, a call to arms meant for hugging. Steam valves and pistons of breath cycle into quick rhythmic stabs; ritual supplants noise, noise tilts into song. Wassermann reverses the trained control of the voice to discover empowerment in growls, screams, baby-animal whines, and undersea calls.

These are song forms not as fixed structures, but as living organisms – colorful tendrils of sound, improvisation as feedback between inner listening and the outside world. In the album’s final movements, her voice becomes something both larger than a person and tinier: an army of intimacies, gnawing at the root, feeding.

chimeric is an album teeming with vivid colors and transcendental beauty that reveals the voice as a truly limitless instrument.