Disquiet

Late last year, the musician Lesley Flanigan performed in San Francisco at the new art space Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, or GAFFTA. She moved with an austere grace among instruments of her own making, each a mix of plain wood and modest electronics. The objects suggested some intersection of Muji, the Japanese masters of generic design, and Radio Shack, the ubiquitous American repository of inexpensive gadgets and gadget parts. These pieces of Flanigan’s, in their resolute simplicity, seemed to take the idea of “Ikea hacking” to the next logical extreme: “Ikea circuit-bending.”

In Flanigan’s hands, each device emitted a range of raspy feedback, which she coaxed with her microphone — a microphone that served the dual purpose of amplifying her voice, a confident soprano that suggested echoes of Billie Holiday in its slurred, mouthy vowels. More often than not, her singing took on the characteristics of a boys choir, thanks to endless permutations of sonic mirroring. The music she performed that evening was drawn from Amplifications, her recent album for voice and speakers that certifies Flanigan as a musician who straddles numerous realms that are often understood as standing in opposition to each other: melody and noise, technology and song, recording and performance.

Now, the blending of accomplished female vocals and edge-pushing technology is not in and of itself new. From Björk’s collaborations with the duo Matmos, to Destiny’s Child’s beats provided by all manner of producers, all the way back to the Roaches’ work with guitarist Robert Fripp, there is no small number of examples of accomplished female singers who partner successfully with experimental musicians. What distinguishes Flanigan isn’t merely that she can handle both sides of that age-old equation — what is remarkable is how substantially her vocals and technology meld.

For all the haunting lushness of Amplification‘s “Retrobuild,” which is almost entirely made of layers of her singing, it’s the mix of electronic buzzing and lightly mediated vocalizing on the track “Sleepy” where her powers are made fully clear, the way as a composer and performer she blurs the technological and the human, finding a common musical ground that has the drone as its foundation, but that aspires to something song-like.

Here, for example, is the track “Snow,” also from Amplifications. It begins as raw feedback, short circuits captured by recording equipment in loving detail, and then slowly comes to form something almost choral in its density, her voice eventually sliding in alongside the rough static:

The tools that Flanigan employs in Amplifications are by no means the extent of her output, just a recent milestone in her creative process. She has developed “Bioluminescence,” a live audio/video collaboration with R. Luke DuBois, and documented nocturnal activity in a series of thousands of tiny photographs (titled “In Sleep”). Her “Ravezooka,” produced with Benedetta Piantella Simeonidis, “shoots” audio at a distance, and her “Round Sound” project is an experiment in the visualization of sonic data.

Contacted shortly after the GAFFTA performance, Flanigan took time to discuss various aspects of her work, from the sense of freedom inherent in new technology, to the extent of her musical training, to the sculptural value of her sound objects.

Marc Weidenbaum: Do you think your musical training lends an additional depth of musicality to even the noisiest, most seemingly discordant executions on your speaker-instruments?

Lesley Flanigan: My musical training is in soprano voice, and the most valuable skills I took from that training were physical things like how to breathe properly and how to sing high notes without hurting myself. Other than that, I don’t really have that much musical training. I have a lot of experience with music – but not much training.

I studied art and sculpture in school, so any training that I bring to my work comes more from these places. I think it is my lack of musical training that lends additional depth of musicality to my work, because the music I make depends entirely on my ear. I naturally have a good ear and am not locked into any expectation for a musical timbre. It is my love and respect for classical approaches to music, along with my sculptural tendencies, that compel me to arrange some semblance of musicality out of all the pitches, rhythms, and sounds I hear with my instruments. I use methods that involve my voice as instrument and my experience with composition to do this, but my ear does most of the work. My music is simple. Whether pop, experimental, or classical, my music all comes from the same process of throwing down a palette of sounds and then intuitively organizing them. With my work now, I’m more transparent about the process. The process is the composition: noise to sound to music. It’s sculptural music.
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