d e a d c e o

I had the pleasure of interviewing vocalist Carol Genetti at her home in Chicago sometime in 2002. Carol is a vocal improvisor who has performed around the world with artists such as Eric Leonardson, Andrea Polli, Olivia Block, Jack Wright, Pauline Oliveros, Jon Rose, Michael Zerang, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Jeb Bishop, and many others. Although this interview reads very seriously, most of it was riddled with laughing although I've edited a good portion of the silliness for the sake of brevity. I just don't want "(laughs)" on every single line. [laughs]
-Woody Sullender

Woody: First off, how did you become a "vocal improvisor"?

Carol: Well, I used to always improvise with my sister when I was a little girl so I think I knew I always wanted to do this but didn’t know it was an available medium.

What kind of stuff?

She would make up these songs and I would just make up harmonizations that would go with it or stuff like that. I think the most radical thing we did was to sing two notes that were right next to each other and feel the buzzing sensation. Ever done that?

Yeah, at what age was this though? That’s pretty wild.

Like five, six, seven. We were pretty wild but I think most kids are and I think they just forget about it.

Also, I come from a visual art background and I was always in conflict with should I be doing more singing or doing more visual arts and painting. I was doing a lot of painting and I was doing a lot of shows and I had this idea that I don’t want to make any more objects that I have to carry around with me. So, I decided to just focus on the voice.

So, I went to the Art Institute here and took a class with Lynn Book who is an experimental vocalist now living in New York. She exposed me to more experimental voice stuff. She did Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate hereself. I got into performance art and then more improv stuff and dropped all the visual aspects.

What or who specifically influenced your creative use of voice?

Initially hearing scat jazz voice made me think "okay, you don’t have to sing a tune with words, you can actually sing without words." And hearing people like Meredith Monk, who now seems pretty tame to me. Shelley Hirsch has also been really influential.

I don’t think I’ve heard her.

The one thing she did that was really influential for me is this album of duets with Jon Rose on this multi-string cello thing and her singing just goes off into freak land. Similar to Shelly Hirsch is Patty Waters, she totally goes off into lulu land.

Define "lulu land" for me.

She just totally goes crazy vocally. It’s not just doing all of these impressive sounds but she totally opens the door to her soul and all this stuff is pouring out. Somewhat similar to Yoko Ono’s screamy stuff but a bit more refined, and actually to me more intense.

There does seem to be a wide variety of this vocal work. I don’t want to just pigeonhole it as "people making weird sounds." There’s everything from Russian futurist sound poetry to Schwitters to Yaap Blonk as well as scat or even hip-hop as vocal improvising. How do you see yourself historically?

I don’t feel like I know enough about the sound poetry stuff to say I’ve been really super influenced by it although recently I’ve been more into it. I guess I think there is something musical that has to be there for me and I never felt like the Ursonate had that for me although some people’s versions do.

I feel like I’m more into just using the voice abstractly. I really wanted to avoid using words. I was interested in getting into the abstract quality of the voice and not having anything so literal happening, either musically as in musical notes or as a language. But now that I have heard someone like Elka Shippard who is kinda going in between those two like language and getting into the musicality of language and just the abstract way that language sounds. But, I think I’m just much more abstract than that. My thing is to totally strip away those things as much as I can. I also fit in with the women I was talking about by just letting go and going crazy with it. I feel that was my first impetus with it but now I’ve gotten more compositional with my improvisations.

As opposed to "going crazy"?

I’ve become more refined with it and focusing on making my choices more careful. I am really intrigued by a lot of different people and sometimes I think it would be really cool to do this really angry fucking female thing. But, I think that’s kinda old and people don’t want to hear that anymore.

Its also quite pigeonholed as well.

Right, and even though I feel it’s a worthy thing and you could do it but it has such a different context now, it would be such a different thing.

It’s hard to say what the experimental voice thing is at this point. I still feel it is really pushed aside compared to other instruments. I feel people just don’t want to hear it which just makes you want to rant more. You are continually reminded why people did do stuff like Diamanda Galas but then you can’t do that!

How do you feel the voice then differs from other instruments?

I think the way voice is trained isn’t a rigorous as other instruments, especially Western voice. Its rigorous in terms of getting the right placement and the whole physicality of it and practice. But Western singing, there’s not as much of a rigorous training as far as different modes and different scales. You don’t get that like a jazz player does.

The other thing that’s really different about the voice is that no matter what you do and how abstract you feel you are getting with it, you still end up sounding human. You can sometimes get away with it, sounding like a machine. But, they’re playing an object. There’s just this human quality that comes with the voice. I’ve grown to understand that it really is different from the other instruments. It’s frustrating because I want it to be accepted as an instrument and integrated as an instrument.

It seems like when one talks about improvisors and their relationships with their instruments, language metaphors always come up like "I can really hear what he’s saying" or "she’s trying to find what she’s trying to say."

It’s more metaphorical than with the voice you really are saying something.

Yeah, I wonder if that’s the stumbling block there. Its past metaphor. People are looking for actual language within your voice even though you’re doing abstract stuff. As in, people can accept a flute for just playing "doo" and it’s just a sound. Where with a voice, people try to assemble it into some sort of cognitive language.

Yeah, I think you’re right. It’s weird because I just don’t see the voice as a language instrument that much. When I do my singing, I see it as an instrument. It may not come off that way and that’s the frustration. When I listen back to recordings, I’m like "I sound like I’m crying" and its much more emotional then I felt like it was during the actual performance. That happens a lot.

This is a really obnoxious question. Right now, you are improvising on your instrument. How does that function differently than with people on instruments?

Its different. First, I’m using words and I’m thinking about improvising. My god, that is a obnoxious question. It’s the context. Also, I don’t think when I’m just talking, I’m not using the voice in the same kind of way. It is interesting because a lot of people think "I can do that, she’s just making weird sounds".

Like the Pollock of instrumentation where "I can do that!"

I can’t believe people would say that because first of all, who would go up there and make those weird noises. And it’s not as easy as people think it is. It depends on how long you’ve been doing it, how much you focus, how much you’ve listened to, its like any improv. I think people don’t realize how much discipline it takes to that and do it for a long time.

How do you stay in shape?

I have to sing scales. Definitely, I do.

Getting back to my obnoxious question, when you’re playing in a musical context with someone like Fred Lonberg-Holm as opposed to a more textural performer like Eric Leonardson, there is that interaction between improvisers where you are "communicating" back and forth. It is obnoxious, but there are some similarities. Like right now, we are improvising and there is communication. How is it that much different than playing?

That’s interesting. There are definitely some friends of mine that I improvise with vocally on the phone. But mostly, it is language based although I do think of every sound as music, all and all. But, I feel it is different when you’re focusing on it as music as opposed to something else.

Yeah, the social context obviously plays a large part. Like, people aren’t lined up here watching us.

Well, that’s not too different [laughs].