Sound, the Sublime and Static Funk
I learned music by listening, imitating, and experimenting alone or with others. First in high school accompanied by my brother, I began with folk music, which speaks of travel, sadness, joy, love, death, and war.
In college I started listening more to punk, which also speaks of love, of failure, but equally of struggle and freedom. I was adopted into a group of girls who at the time were playing Bikini Kill covers in a band called Boobie Trap. They left that band and we started a Phil Spectre cover band called Mink Stole, named after the actress featured in John Waters films. I was the lead singer. In 2001, we formed an original band in NYC called Tallboys, where I picked up the guitar and a stage name Sheila16. Writing songs collaboratively, we played regularly in local clubs in NYC and on tours. With those girls I really felt free to learn to play, create through experimentation and perform aggressively with my whole body. Also, for better or worse, being in that band felt like being in a gang, it was an identity. But the other girls were ambitious and very concerned about our image which felt burdensome to me. I left that band in 2006 after a dispute while recording an album, a fight over creative control.
That year, I had started playing with a couple of drummers from experimental bands, Dave Nuss from the No Neck Blues Band and Aaron Moore from Volcano the Bear. With them, in our band Amolvacy, I was able to release the voice, and stop thinking about words, just scream, sing and play whatever instrument I wanted to make a sound with. Finally, without having to define a genre of music, I could escape language and just focus on our collaboration and our sound. We released 2 Albums, Ho ho kus and A La Lu La.
I left that group after almost 5 years in 2011, and for several years while moving countries and touring dance performances I did not have another project, though I played at home when I could and recorded some songs on my own. In 2016, I began practicing diphonic singing after I had my daughter in France. Isolated and learning French, I came upon an American cowboy song, Lonesome Cowboy by Arthur Miles, whose singing technique, a whistling type of diphonic singing, I was able to imitate. The story is of a man who kills his friend in passionate jealousy and must forever roam alone, a fugitive from himself, a kind of parable about the tragedy that comes from unexamined anger.
At the same time, I was studying Pauline Oliveros’ sonic meditations and teaching them/practicing them in classes at the art school. Singing with a double voice became a personal sound meditation with viola and led to a performance. The practice of repetition and attention to breath, leads to uncontrolled changes in sound and powerful, deep sensations within myself. It is as if the natural occurring functions of my body when letting go develop their own composition.
In my current practice, using my stage name Sheila xvi (this time using Roman numerals), I use synthesizers to create drones or rhythms. My instrument is the Soma Pulsar-23. Interactive and sensitive, it is like something from nature, shifting in subtle or dynamic ways. In my project Static Funk/émergence subliminales I work on the threshold between noise and form. Using the conceptual framework of an organic process or a thought process, I create the feeling that a rhythm or melody has almost taken shape only to be lost again in noise, making way for new/almost/other forms. I am interested in embodiment, the feeling that my body is implicated in whatever is created. Seeking a feeling of movement, I don’t always try to control my instrument but listen for surprises and allow them to surface in this interplay between noise and form.
I also play acoustic instruments such as the viola or guitar, and I sing. I sometimes record myself amid the chaos of my child Aïcha playing. Sometimes, if she’s interested, she participates. I’ve begun recording folk songs with synthesizer—a strange blend, a difficult negotiation. I’m inspired by Arthur Russell, who had no problem working with wildly different genres of music; disco, experimental, and folk/country. I want to further develop this connection between American folk songs and prerecorded sound, live noises, and synthesizer.
My various experiences with sound have led me to think about sound in relation to the concept of the sublime. Certain sonic practices I have experimented with such as breath, repetition, emergence, shape the way I think about the sublime in its contemporary context. When I think of the sublime in the contemporary sense of the word/world, I don’t think of it in the Kantian sense of a pure aesthetic moment limited to a confrontation with the enormity of nature. In my opinion, that idea, of the austerity of nature and the man who looks upon it in wonder, is fetishistic and dangerous. Many things in nature scare me and create wonder, but I would rather think of the sublime as an overwhelming feeling of awe that emerges through a process of relating and rescaling perception. And I believe that it is often more complex and relational. I experience the sublime when I watch my 10 year old daughter amongst thousands of women lift her fist for the first time at a women’s rights march. I feel it when I witness a student, who has been struggling, make a breakthrough in their work. Kant distinguishes the sublime as a state of admiration from beauty as a state of love, but I absolutely disagree. I believe that the sublime must come from a moment of profound love and a perceived change of state that is both inward and outward, like a meeting. In nature it is a feeling of overwhelm, like confronting a place where love and death meet, thinking, “I love this and someday it/I will be gone.” But it also happens within the confluence of the imagination and the present. Finally, I believe the sublime occurs most often in music.
When I think of music in its contemporary context and how I want to make music, I think of transformation that moves through the sublime. The transformation is physical and psychic and it doesn’t necessarily have language. One sound leads to another, in the hopes of passing on to something else again, like questions following questions, though the questions are not necessarily formulated in words. I like to think of it as a way of working that is both affirming of a moment, connecting the past to the present, and experimental in that it welcomes change.
