When people show up at a performance by the artistic chamber-pop duo Ringdown, they often expect to be presented with a choral performance.
Granted, that’s not an entirely out-of-left-field misconception. One half of the duo is composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist Caroline Shaw, who was catapulted into the public eye at age 30 when her “Partita for 8 Voices,” written for vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, made her the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. In the ensuing years, Shaw has created scads of concert music, which has been performed by ensembles including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, So Percussion, and the Attacca Quartet as well as Roomful of Teeth, in which she sings alto.
So when she performs with Ringdown, a project she cofounded with her partner-now-spouse, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Danni Lee Parpan, she finds it “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and one of the most rewarding,” she said.
A decorated composer of concert music branching out into experimental pop might as well have been tailor made for the Stave Sessions, the annual fringe festival at Somerville’s Crystal Ballroom hosted by Vivo Performing Arts, formerly Celebrity Series of Boston. This year’s event, across four nights in February, presents performances by chamber sextet yMusic, the Ireland-based Dublin Guitar Quartet (which promises an all-guitar arrangement of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”), and Canadian Inuk singer-songwriter Elisapie as well as Ringdown, which makes its local debut with these concerts.
Parpan, a former “super band nerd” who went to school for theater before picking up the tenor ukulele, is the closest thing to a lead singer and frontperson that Ringdown has. She enjoys breaking the fourth wall and talking to the audience.
“I live for the in-between moments, when the musician is suddenly a human,” she enthused. In the meantime, Shaw’s classical background makes her want to “keep the ambience going.”
This has led some to wonder whether their banter is scripted, said Shaw. Once, the two played a show in Milan and unexpectedly spotted art-world prankster Maurizio Cattelan, who is best known for being “the banana guy,” Shaw said. (Cattelan’s piece “Comedian” consisted of a banana duct-taped to a wall.)
“We were talking afterward, and I think he thought [Ringdown] was a performance art piece,” Shaw laughed. “It’s really just the shtick that happens because of who we are. … There’s something incredibly honest about the show.”
Coming from the classical world, Shaw said performing in Ringdown is hard because “it’s really vulnerable: I’m going to sing you a song, I’m going to show you this whole world that lives inside our head. I want to look at people out there,” said Shaw. “We’re starting to write more songs for the next record, and I just love it.”
Personal vulnerability is also at the center of Elisapie Isaac’s most recent project, “Inuktitut”: an album of covers by artists including Queen, Metallica, Blondie, and the Rolling Stones, translated into the indigenous language Isaac grew up speaking at home in Salluit, an isolated small town in the northernmost reaches of Quebec.
These were some of the songs that Isaac, who performs under her first name, would hear at the local dance hall or on the local radio station. That was not only a source of music from “the south,” but a lifeline of her community starting in the 1970s, she said. “People would call in. Elders would call to do storytelling,” said Isaac in a phone interview. When Isaac spent a night with her boyfriend as a teenager, she said, her frantic mother called the radio station in the morning to let the town know to be on the lookout. Come morning, as Isaac walked home, “everyone was looking at me,” she recalled, laughing.
As a child, Isaac had heard members of her community perform popular songs in Inuktitut at gatherings. “I thought ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Four Strong Winds’ were Inuk songs,” she said. In that spirit, “Inuktitut” was initially only intended to be a side project, something fun she could do to “take it easy,” she said. Then she noticed herself being overwhelmed with emotions as she sang. “It became kind of a healing journey, going back home in my head,” she said.
Certain songs, like Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” and Metallica’s “The Unforgiven,” always felt to Isaac like they were “telling their story with a northern [Inuit] point of view,” she said. “Though they were not in Inuktitut, it’s like they were already transmitted to our heart, to our brain. And our brains kind of already translated them,” she said. To “The Unforgiven,” which Isaac described as having a “very male point of view,” Isaac added accents of katajjaq, Inuit throat-singing traditionally performed by pairs of women. “There’s that feminine touch, as if we’re carrying him,” she explained. “That balance, to me, felt very natural.”
STAVE SESSIONS
Presented by Vivo Performing Arts. Crystal Ballroom, Somerville. Feb 18-21, www.vivoperformingarts.org
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her @knitandlisten.