Deep Voices #85
Mouth stuff
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As the set was changed for the second half of Shelley Hirsch’s performance of “And So It Was and Was and WaAAass,” a large brown bag was introduced. It sat next to the black easy chair, placed on the floor. She’d performed the first half on the stage, but migrated to the ground after intermission.She sat for much of that first half, reciting a long, winding narrative from a notebook, a Greek chorus of three behind her on a couch and a keyboard, occasionally rising to echo her in harmony. Hirsch was wearing the first of two wild outfits, the first a neon bohemian look, a shiny, bright silver shirt paired with a long green skirt. Her hair was dyed a tasteful blue. For the second half of the performance, she changed into plaid pants and a floor length halter top made of the type of shoe rack you hang on the back of your door. Good looks for intermittent screaming.
Hirsch eventually found her way to the bag and began emptying it of leaves by the fistful (whether it was actual leaves or brown shredded paper, I’m not entirely sure). While doing this, she was executing a mesmerizing vocal performance that featured stuttering, operatic wails. She paced, threw leaves, gesticulated, and occasionally stood before a blackboard on an easel and wrote the words she was saying in large white script. Hey ma ma ma! Hey ma ma ma! she said, over and over. There was a moody electronic drone as an undercurrent that was essentially unnecessary; Hirsch was plenty of show.
For a brief time, the musician Ka Baird joined her. Baird is a similarly elastic vocalist, and the two of them performed a duel of sorts, yelping and squawking at each other, throwing leaves. It resembled experimental theater, an improv set, a hardcore show. The whole thing was extremely fucking weird and excellent and I loved it. True freaks!
What’s special about a vocal performer is they don’t need anything external from their own body. With the same tool, one you’re born with, you get Usher or Adele or Shelley Hirsch or Ka Baird. It’s very democratic. For this week’s playlist, I included a song from the latter two, along with 12 other songs from vocalists I love, with an emphasis on the stranger side of things. We’ve got spoken word, folk, jazz, (Matana Roberts is at least all three) and, in Mark William Lewis, one of my favorite literal deep voices.
Playlist notes:
•The Shelley Hirsch piece I included is titled “Sitting in a Room,” a seeming wink to composer Alvin Lucier’s vocal piece, “I Am Sitting in a Room.” In that piece, from 1969, Lucier reads four sentences about him in fact sitting in a room. He describes what he is going to do: record himself speaking, play the recording, and then re-record it, intending for the vocal to garble and the resonance of the room to take over the recording. It’s high concept stuff with a touch of humor, and it reminds me of Sol LeWitt’s conceptual drawing pieces that are only a list of instructions. Hirsch’s “Sitting in a Room” does not actually reference Lucier, and I wondered if maybe it was a subtle diss that she instead mentions another composer, John Cage. Maybe Lucier is too cerebral? Though she’s not exactly complimentary of Cage here either. Hirsch doesn’t seem like she wants to sit anywhere, a room or otherwise. “John Cage says, ‘Music’s supposed to quiet the mind,’” she sings, “But it’s always bringing me places of the heart.”
•Full disclosure, a note on Ka Baird: I attended the Hirsch concert where they performed with my friend Matt Werth who owns and operates the RVNG record label, which releases Baird’s work. But I think if I was truly biased I would have gotten around to listening to their album sooner than five years after it came out. Joke’s on me, because Respires is excellent. Baird is a deconstructionist, which philosophically means someone who looks at texts and breaks them apart. That is likely technically accurate to Baird’s work, considering the fragmenting of language they do. But I’m thinking of them more as a deconstructionist as someone the opposite of someone working in construction, someone who uses a bulldozer not to build stuff, but to knock stuff over and make a big mess. I get the feeling that would not be something to which they’d take offense.
•I wonder if I am introducing anyone here to folk singer Karen Dalton, owner of the greatest voices in recorded history? An exaggeration? May Frank Ocean himself strike me down if I lie. If you’ve not heard Dalton’s It’s So Hard to Know Who’s Going to Love You Best, it’s probably a good idea to queue that up now. (The documentary Karen Dalton: In My Own Time is fantastic as well). Dalton, who died in 1993 after a life of addiction, was a contemporary of Dylan, and he was a big fan. Her voice is more tender than his, or anyone’s, really. She had a fragile warble. Her voice is high-pitched, sometimes squeaky, almost Muppet-like. All of her recorded music is cover songs, usually songs of love (of praise or lament), which I did not realize for a long time after I discovered her because she so wholly embodies a song that any other prior rendition seems irrelevant. I added her song, “I Love You More Than Words Can Say,” towards the end of making this playlist because she’s so transcendent it almost didn’t occur to me that she fit in. Maybe she doesn’t.