“The album was recorded in the winter of 2017. I always feel that the cello is a kind of instrument that is full of sorrow and narration, like an aged intoning the past repeatedly and sadly alone. In my ordinary work, the concept of “narration” is always excluded on purpose. Or, it is taken as a part that I don’t want to deal with but have to. Thus, the cello, which is particular but unitary for me, can express a kind of true emotion which is very “clumsy”, because true emotions always seem to be clumsy by being direct and parched. This album emphasizes the concept of “performer”, which refers to the one, the fingers, the power and the immediate state of the breath when playing the instrument, without overmuch decoration and editing, or splendid and adept performing skills. Each track was performed and recorded from start to finish once and once again, in which some mistakes were retained and chosen reasonably. The name of each track is made from the names of gods in Bon religion. Those gods are the creators of the beginning of the universe. Their original form is egg, which transformed into space. The time and space structure they created was bulks of passivity. That’s Bon religion’s descriptions of the universe and the world. If certain cognition of forms must be given to gods and time and space, the best description that breaks the linear conception would be the space of “passivity”, in which music was born. The world view of oviparity is full of uncertainty. It grows and dies under a set structure of bulk.”

Because I knew Evan [Parker] was coming to town, which means triple exclamation point” – Galás gives a throaty laugh – “that I decided to study with Frank Kelly, a teacher who was kinda infamous as a bel canto teacher. He said to me, ‘OK, you are doing avant garde singing. I don’t know what the hell that means. But I want to ask you something: sing this.’ And he said, ‘Let me tell you something, if you can’t get through a phrase of Mozart, I can guarantee that you are not going to be able to do what you think you’re doing or that you want to do.’ And at that point I started studying with him. And this guy would yell, very loudly, if he didn’t like what you were doing. He was a brilliant teacher, absolutely wonderful teacher. He and I would have these lessons, five lessons a week, sometimes ten, and he would yell, ‘What is it with you sopranos? You’re always trying to get to the top of the scale! You have to have your feet, the claws of your feet, in the ground before you can expect to be able to sustain let alone produce a high note of quality.’

“We worked that year with so many composers from the 19th century,” she continues. “It was really hard and Kelly had no sympathy at all. I was also training to be ready for the Vinko Globokar performance, Un Jour Comme Un Autre, at the Festival d’Avignon in 1979. This is a work that was based on the true story of the torture and ‘suicide’ of a Turkish woman accused of treason. It’s an exceedingly difficult piece of work that had ruined vocalists before me with its precise notation of multiphonics. So extended vocal techniques for me meant everything including bel canto sound, but also unvibrated sound, what are called multiphonics – as well as diplophonics, triplophonics, many sounds within resonances at the same time. It can also mean different forms of staccato, types of ingressive singing, although that’s a bit limited because singers don’t have circular breathing like horn players. We just do a different type of vocal formation. There’s also the way that Middle Eastern and Greek music is sung. There are many different factors that have played into my [singing] vocabulary. But I have always said that there are 400 ways to scream, not just four or six. I remember giving a demo to a group of heavy metal guys. I told them that you cannot just go” – and she roars briefly down the phone – “because that only tells me one thing. I want to know the world from your eyes.”

Via The Wire

Biba Kopf on the Wire reflects on the career of the solo artist, former Birthday Party guitarist and These Immortal Souls frontman

“Interspecies Smalltalk has sections, each with a different set of triggering pitches. He knew that if he played some of those pitches something would happen in the electronics. He could choose which sections he wanted to play, and if he didn’t like a particular section he could skip over it. The software was made so that if Kosugi didn’t start playing it would move on to the next section. If he did play it would stay in that section until he stopped and then move on. He did some astonishing things that I never would have thought of myself. If I had notated that piece it wouldn’t have been nearly so good. My role was to mix the different elements, and there was a subsidiary part that I sometimes played on a keyboard, adding a few extra tones here and there. I learned that you don’t want to tell the musician what to do, but on the other hand if the electronic music is not lively on its own you are relying too much on what the player does, and then there’s something wrong with the piece.”

Trumpeter Ben Neill, who can be heard on the Leapday Night CD and also Behrman’s Unforeseen Events CD has been another invaluable collaborator. “I can thank Rhys Chatham for introducing me to Ben. For years my notation was software. Notation that only a few nerdy designers could read. I’ve actually been wanting to revive the piece Leapday Night. But I look at the old software and I can barely understand it. It’s in a language that I stopped using 30 years ago. Plus it was instructions to homemade synthesizers that I don’t have any more. The MIDI synthesizers I used in the 80s still exist but they are heavy to lug around. Theoretically they are replaceable by software, but getting laptops to sound the way those synthesizers did is very hard. That’s something I’ve had to deal with through decades – changing technology and repertory vanishing simply because it can’t be revived. If you have a good recording, then at least you do have that.”

David Behrman

via Decade 77-87