The Zen Kiss

I’m very aware of the relationship between the creative process and my ego. I can have a sense how I would like things to be but it doesn’t necessarily translate realistically. I think that conscious intelligence is often inferior to this instinctive intelligence. The process is not about constructing your work of art, it’s about connecting to something higher and allowing it to weave levels into your work for you to discover later.

My work has always been fuelled by an intensely personal interest rather than by any kind of intellectual quest. By following my voice I have been guided to musical and personal discoveries. I think it has worked this way because I have had no musical sense of geographical and traditional barriers.

The voice has always been the centre of my universe. I had been experimenting with soul, gospel and other highly ornamented styles before joining Monsoon in the early 1980s. Later, as I started to listen to other vocal musics, especially British folk music, I discovered that the key ornaments sung by June Tabor or Sandy Denny, for instance, were exactly the same as the ones used in the north Indian tradition.

To find the links between these juxtapositions of notes was a real key for me. I made up silly names for them so that I could identify each one. With time I could listen to a piece of music and recognize new connections. To be able to follow at great speed in my mind the exact notes of each ornament that someone else was singing was a real thrill. The links are all there in Islamic, Andalusian, Bulgarian and Celtic musics, for instance.

The concept of drone has been important in bringing these many influences together. I think that life has a drone, like your blood singing in your ears or the sound of the stream. Where there is a constant drone, it’s not difficult to bring musics together as I do. I am often unaware of the precise joining point between two styles; it seems so natural to slip from one style to another.

It’s fascinating the way that you can move from singing a soul vocal to an Islamic vocal, and then into that very hard guttural sound of Andalusia. It becomes a kind of vocal chain, with techniques leading into each other.

My last album, Weaving My Ancestors Voices illustrates crossing between different musics within a single vocal line. The Zen Kiss has moved on. The structure of my songs have become more challenging now that those connections have been absorbed into my sub-conscious. I now see a place, like the eye of the storm, where there’s just pure vocal.

With the ‘Speaking In Tongues’ pieces I have pushed the boundaries even further. The idea stems from an Indian technique of calculation for drummers. The sounds that drummers make on the two, main classical drums (tabla in the North and mrdingam in the South) are repeated as onomatopeic syllables. You learn the syllables first, before you pick up the drum. In South India it has become a vocal art form called Konnakol. I have discarded the calculation and the rigid time cycles and use the technique to achieve a purely emotive collage of sound. I’m breaking up patterns and throwing you off the beat, being as mad and chaotic as possible, yet I’m also keeping you hooked using the psychology of the rhythm. I have started to build in other percussive elements like elocution exercises and silly tongue twisters, snippets from advertising jingles, or an ancient Celtic imitation of bird song— anything that will get you to question the nature of these percussive syllables rather than accepting them because you think they’re traditional.

‘Speaking in Tongues IV’, which moves through vocal percussion singing and then into singing, maps out the different points of reference between pure vocal percussion and song. It’s a very playful process to chop up rhythms and stick them back together. It’s almost like giving a voice to the chatter that goes on in your mind. A reviewer in Australia said it was like a lover’s quarrel; it’s true, there are a lot of changes in tone that imply two voices. When I perform the ‘Speaking In Tongues’ pieces some people think that they are improvised. In fact, it took me eight months to write the two pieces on this album! Every single syllable is set and never changes in performance, and if they weren’t, with so many clips and changes, I would probably fall into a rhythm which would spoil the chaotic effect.

I  would class these as post-sampling compositions! I don’t think I have written them without having heard samplers and what they’re capable of. My point is that the human sampler is ultimately the best. I often get a sense that when an audience sees me completely alone on stage beginning a ‘Speaking In Tongues’ piece they are not sure whether I can actually deliver. When I do, they take away with them a tremendous sense of abundance and empowerment, knowing that even though technology is all around us, it is still human skill and inspiration that are the most important things.