If youÕre getting overtones in there, you might say itÕs eight octaves going up the other way. Dogs are barking.

This is what I do: I get onto a note, I sing it in a very relaxed vocal production, but you know exactly where the breath is all the time, and you know where the resonance is, itÕs right up front, but itÕs got this diaphramatic thing going, constantly giving it air, and itÕs very relaxed. You have to have the throat completely open; if itÕs tight you canÕt make a sound at all. And then what happens out of that tone is you can resonate tones that go much lower than that.

I donÕt know what IÕm doing, really, itÕs just that I can feel that the resonance is in the sternum, and then the nose, and then once that goes, you can somehow get higher notes from that first note, then youÕve got like three of Õem going. So then itÕs more a sensation, and you have to have the correct sensation, you have to be very relaxed to do it. And when you do it, itÕs a blast, itÕs really easy. And itÕs very healthy for the voice, because there can be no tension in the vocal cords.

You had to have trained a lot to reach a point where that kind of facility with the voice was possible.

ItÕs mandatory if you want to extend the voice, doing the kind of work I do, to know what youÕre doing technically. I learned it from having a father whoÕs very musical and who also sang and who would talk about Sinatra learning from Tommy Dorsey, learning from breath, you know, what a trombonist has to do in order to do long phrases. But also later on I was studying, because what I was trying to do was theoretically impossible, in many ways. It was an attempt to be able to do a lot of what horn players do with circular breathing ŠŠ but voices, we donÕt have circular breathing.

There are lots of people who do this, all over the world. I donÕt know where they do it in the Middle East or in Greece, but the closest sound may be in Georgia Ń in the Black Sea area there are a lot of interesting parallels, because they have these looow bass choirs, and maybe some of them are doing something like that. My fatherÕs father was from the Eastern part of Turkey, and IÕve heard a lot of music from that area that has some of that quality.

photo: Kristopher Buckle

When you hear it played back, does it sound different than it does inside your head?

ItÕs a sensation in your skull, itÕs great, itÕs just intense. And it sounds louder because itÕs amplified, obviously. I have so much fun with it Ń I can literally sing, like, a semitone scale, just for a laugh. And I do it sometimes right in the middle of a piece. IÕm just having a blast improvising.

In live performance, your music seems to contain then release enormous waves of mind, muscle, sex and heart. Is that because youÕre filled to bursting, or are you a channeler of some kind? A bit of both, I expect.

God, thereÕs this shithead out there, Mike Patton. He imitates me. He imitates everybody. That motherfucker short fuckinÕ midget, he was at all my shows in the Õ90s. He wrote in Wire magazine that I donÕt improvise. I just laughed. I go onstage completely empty, and for what I do you have to be vocally wound up. There are all these people who just go onstage and make weird noises, do whatever they can do to get through the performance, and thatÕs fine. But for me, I have to have phrasing, and go between multiphonics or bel canto or all these things, and I canÕt be, ŅOh, IÕm going from the high voice to the chest voice to the multiphonics,Ó I canÕt be thinking like that onstage. So I have to be ready for it, and the technique is good, and I canÕt have a lot of chattering going on in my head. And then I just go onstage and play.

And itÕs just you and a piano, which is amazing, considering the orchestral sound youÕre making. A full band would most likely just screw it up, anyway.

With my Bosendorfer, with the black keys I can do the drums as well; itÕs almost like itÕs not even tonal anymore, itÕs like Fedex to the office on the black keys. With the piano, I can change all the rhythm, but all the notes are a function of the rhythm. So theyÕre not superfluous, theyÕre a function of changing the rhythm. So IÕm changing the rhythm or then playing either the solo stuff or the changes here and then maybe doing a kind of tonal thing, and then kind of laying the boards over that.

ItÕs like that Hitchcock thing, where you just keep it clean and you know why youÕre there at a particular time. And you know and I know that those blues guys like John Lee Hooker and certainly HowlinÕ Wolf, theyÕd be changing the rhythm all the time. ItÕs not like what I hear blues people doing now, this stinky fucking line that just goes on and on and on, and at the end of the song IÕm like, ŅWell? And so what happened?Ó

What happened is that now you are ten minutes older.

Interestingly enough, since 9/11, a lot of people coming from the Middle East are saying there would be no blues if there were no muezzin singing, and I said, ŅWell, you know, the reason I wonÕt argue with that is that music comes from Byzantium, from the mixture of all these cultures in the Middle East, including Anatolia, Turkey, Greece.Ó Where did the music of Islam come from? Well, it came from the Arabs, originally. Who did the Arabs get it from? The Arabs took it from the Greeks. They all changed music together in that melting pot of the Black Sea and Egypt and Turkey; in all those Arab countries, there was this exchange of music. So you have this bending of the tones, and you donÕt just have a five-note scale Ń what is that? All these taqsims and the makams, all these scales.

And that is what I hear when I listen to most interesting blues music, which I feel is from Somalia and Ethiopia right now, because they have to get up there and be really good qaraami singers Ń the improvised music of that whole part of the world Ń and then they have to be pop singers and blues singers, too. So they get up and they start the solo with the qaraami, then they go into the song, and they go back into the qaraami. The qaraami is sung by church singers also. But these are real singers Ń I hear it and I think about where the blues is, what the Americans have done to it since then, which is just: repeat.

Though they seem to specialize in it, that overly reverent regard for musical genresÕ classic forms Ń stylizing them till they petrify hard enough to put them up on museum shelves Ń is not an exclusively American problem.

But when people try to get into this ethnic purity thing, like with Wynton Marsalis or Stanley Crouch, itÕs the same thing that people do when they think about Armenian music Ń ŅWell, this scale or sound here is probably Turkish.Ó And I say, ŅHow do you know if itÕs Turkish or not?Ó

A lot of musical idioms and techniques do get called Turkish; Western music critics use ŅTurkish musicÓ as a big umbrella term.

ThatÕs what Turkish imperialism is. They are a very rich country Ń in between what they get from America and what they get from Israel, they do real good. They can afford to have plundered the Assyrians, the Kurdish, the Greeks, the Armenians and many Arabic cultures and call it Turkish. They have borrowed from everyone, and other cultures as well have taken from them. But there is no such thing as a united Turkish music. That is just a bunch of shit.

This whole thing about insults to Turkish people, in Turkey they put people in jail for it. If you say youÕre Assyrian, that means youÕre insulting Turkish people; if you speak Greek, thatÕs an insult to Turkishness. And still, those two cultures melted into music that is now called Turkish music. Anatolia was a huge area that was inhabited by many cultures, and now they call it Turkey. And they say itÕs ŅThe Land of the TurksÓ Ń only because they killed everybody else off that lived there before.

Modern Greek musicians frequently refuse to sing certain songs because they think the songÕs roots are in Islam. But in reality, they donÕt know where that song came from.

There are a lot of people who refuse to perform certain music because they think theyÕre performing music by the enemy tribe. And theyÕre not. ItÕs part of their own music. The Turks employed Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians and Jews to compose music for the sultans. Then they called it ŅTurkish music.Ó

You seem to derive some of your greatest joy in the stories of people you admire, many of whom we arenÕt normally supposed to admire.

Turkey is truly a sultanÕs country, because that was the whole sultan thing, going to the countries like Romania, where Vlad the Impaler was in charge, and saying, ŅWe need 500 boys for the armyÓ Ń for fucking. But thatÕs why Vlad was impaling all his own people; he said, ŅYou steal from your neighbor and I can tell you that the only way to get our country to be morally strong enough to fight the Turks is if you fear me.Ó He got people fuckinÕ terrified so they could fight the Turks.

Vlad the Impaler was a political hero?

He did it with big olÕ stakes, they went right through the asshole, right through the larynx. People took five days to die. He said, ŅYouÕre not afraid to be decapitated anymore. IÕm gonna give you something to be afraid of.Ó Gotta respect a man like that.<

Your 2002 dedication of three concerts to Aileen Wuornos [a Florida prostitute convicted and executed for multiple killings of several johns Wuornos claimed had raped her] was done for related multifarious reasons.

I can understand why some person who gets no justice from the law goes around having to kill. Most street prostitutes get raped several times a year, or they get stood up for their money or they get beat up afterward. After so many years of what Aileen Wuornos was doing, that was what you call critical mass, like, okay, thatÕs it. And after one murder, whatÕs another six? ItÕs just academic.

Yet you speak for the dead. At least thatÕs what the press releases say.

People say that, but I donÕt know what they mean. [laughs] IÕve felt dead enough in my own life. Not to glamorize it too much. I am not a Goth Ń IÕm a Greek. Goth means German. Being a Greek is not a geographical reality, itÕs a spiritual reality. IÕve heard it said you have to go through a wall, and you have to push very hard to go through it. So you have that amount of force to get through it. Also, Greek people are always talking loud, theyÕre screaming all the time, itÕs part of the culture that came up with Greek tragedy. ThatÕs why I love this psychotic art form. Every tragedy that comes out is the avenging of someone by revenge Ń the mother whose son has to be killed, who killed the daughter, who killed the father. ItÕs so close, these things, and blood is too close.

But a song is in a sense a point of being really alive, really very vitally alive. I find it interesting when I hear people say IÕm doing dark subjects, because I think, well, maybe theyÕre thinking that because what IÕm doing is the opposite of being dead, and maybe I have to be extremely energized, or IÕm fighting to get away from something, just getting away from that depression, so I have to fight harder than other people, and maybe that struggle is evident.

I think of another hero of yours, the great singer Patti Waters from back in the Õ60s. She had a kind of woeful sound.

She wasÉmorose? Yeah, maybe in an inward, introverted sense. But IÕm afraid of that word ŠŠ as in unending.

ThereÕs a kind of sadness that makes you want to do things, and a kind where you donÕt want to do anything.

ThereÕs the kind where you donÕt want to do anything but sit in the middle of a bunch of trash on your floorÉI know a lot about that. [laughs] I think itÕs just a real misanthropic, kind of an asocial thing. IÕm the person who doesnÕt go out, that kind of person who Ń I just want to do my own music and just be left alone and letÕs not all get along type of thing.

YouÕve called Xenakis a hero, too. What did he represent?

Xenakis as a Greek was a hero, as a Greek resistance fighter, which is what in fact he was in the war. But heÕs a hero to me because he represents a lot of things to me. He really annoyed and shocked lot of people in the new music world. Very radical figure, as far as IÕm concerned. He had his own experimental laboratory in Paris for his work, he had his own system of how he operated. And he didnÕt work for performers, he composed the work and then performers chose to do them. He was really his own man.

When you actually get a chance to do what it is you know how to do, you remember who you are. And the rest of the time you can literally walk around feeling like a weird homeless person. Like what do I do, actually? Who am I, actually? And that stuff makes you mentally ill. Because living on the edge like that pushes you into places that weÕre all too vulnerable to in the first place.

In the beginning of ŅO Death,Ó we hear a woman singing in the old Greek tradition typical of a dying soldierÕs prayer on the battlefield Ń when he calls for his mother.

While youÕre alive and healthy, you believe that you donÕt need something Ń but, you know, weÕre all good gamblers, and we say, Well, if there is a god, IÕll take you. [laughs] It canÕt hurt.

http://www.diamandagalas.com/