Name: Arthur Morgan Lindsay aka Arto Lindsay
Occupation: Composer, guitarist, songwriter, vocalist, producer
Nationality: American
Current release: Arto Lindsay's new album I Had a Fever When is out via Edition Dur. It features Skúli Sverrisson (bass), and John McCowen (bass clarinet, piccolo flute) and electronics.by Örlygur Steinar Arnalds. About the latter and his own approach to electronic music, Lindsay says: “Öly recorded the sesion as well as treating samples I gave him and adding sounds from his own stash. Like the other musicians he added another angle from which to hear what w were doing. My own relation to electronics is longstanding. A clever way of putting it might be to say that electronics are a way of getting a handle on electricity.”

If you enjoyed this Arto Lindsay interview and would like to find out more about his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on twitter.  



We have a speaking voice and a singing voice. On I Had a Fever When, you add to that your reading voice. Do these feel like they are natural extensions of each other, ends on a spectrum or different in kind?

Though I have never considered them this way I often resort to these different voices, switching or placing myself between them in concert and on record. Sidestepping any attempt to memorize my own lyrics or those of a song I am covering, I bring my lyric sheets on stage, place them on a music stand and refer to them while singing.

So in some sense my singing voice is rarely pure as it always involves a sort of reading. Though sometimes I can't help myself and I remember the lyrics.

Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in your voice and singing?

I am sure they did. My mom was a wonderful pianist and would often play for my brother and I when the electricity went down, as it often did where I was growing up. Her favorite records also must have had an influence. She loved Nat King Cole and had a Debussy record I adored.



She also loved Dorival Cayimmi and pointed out Caetano Veloso to me.



How would you describe the physical sensation of singing? [Where do you feel the voice, do you have a visual sensation/representation, is there a sense of release or tension etc …]

There is a sense of freedom to be found in singing, a sense of connecting things, of making something, as in dancing or writing.  

And you sometimes stumble across strong emotions.

How does the expressive potential of the guitar compare to that of your own voice? How does the relationship you have with your guitar(s) compare to that you have with your own voice?

The guitar is both more limited and further away. What you can't communicate to your instrument with your hands you have to signal to it with your body.

How do you see the relationship between harmony, rhythm and melody?

Harmony, melody and rhythm all seem like aspects of each other. They are separate only insofar as they provide a place to view each other from.

Do you feel that honing your sense of rhythm and groove has an effect on your singing skills?

I hope so!

You've worked as a producer and collaborator with a wide range of singers. What are the things you hear in a voice when listening to a vocalist? What moves you in the voices of other singers?

At the risk of being so general that I am saying nothing, all the small decisions being made or acquiesced to, and the bird's eye view, from lift off to horizon.  And of course the angle, the intervals, between the voice and the song.

And sometimes voices are just such a physical thing.

When you're writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text?

When writing I like to ground a song in natural sounding phrases that upon examination can contain several meanings. These can be contrasted with more rhetorical or "concrete" constructions.

Does it need to feel and sound “good” or “right” to sing certain words?

I notice this more when listening to other singers. I try to refrain from too much intentionality in my own singing. The words can do the work on their own. And I can hope.

On I Had a Fever When, you make use of quotes from literary sources. What is the connection between these sources and passages to the music – and what's your perspective of using someone else's words versus your own?

I actually don't cite anyone on IHAFW. I just refer to a poem, I bring it up. I hope the connections between sources and music are sequential, as are the connections between the sections of music. One thing merely follows, or follows upon, another.

I tried to start from the feeling that you get from an edit in a movie, a change in mood, a soft bass drop, a sudden silence, a jolt or a sudden change in intensity.

Don't singers or reciters usually try to make words "their own"?

Another aspect of the album you mention in the liner note interview is that the work is constructed similar to the way a movie is edited and thateverything takes place on the “horizontal plane.” Why were you intrigued by this idea?

Continuing from the previous answer, I was inspired by intertitles, especially the relation between a storyline and a philosophical historical or poetic quotation.

At best these don't explain, they add another set of meanings.

You've mentioned in a previous interview that at Skyline, “the assistant engineers and the interns referred to singers as the actors,” which seems to tie in with constructing an album like a movie. If the musicians on I Had a Fever When are, in a way, actors – did they know the script beforehand, and what did you communicate to them during the recordings in Reykjavik?

Ha! Referring to singers as actors was not meant as a compliment. Many many  albums have been built to suggest movies. Many styles of music (through repeated use in soundtracks?) have become signifiers for certain feelings.

This was not the approach I took. I started by trying to isolate the feeling of an edit. The musicians showed a bit of resistance to this and wanted to play together. But they soon got the idea.

The sequence of the record is not the sequence in which the elements were recorded.

Tell me a bit about your interest in the borderline between songs and other compositional forms, including free, improvised ones. How does perception depend on the way the material is built, shaped, and presented?

Is a song a song because of the way in which it can be remembered? Or does its relation to conversation or confession come closer to defining it than the form it can take in memory?

Is there a compositional length that allows particular chord changes or melodic phrases to assume a certain focus and to echo the shape of the lyrics? We say the melody and the lyrics seem to have been born together, to be somehow bound together. To give this sense of surprise mixed with inevitability to what are normally considered unconnected gestures is, what can I say, satisfying.

How distant from each other, in making sense, in time signature, in key or intention, do the fragmented elements of a piece of music have to be before they don't seem worth trying to connect?

How has technology, such as autotune or effect processing, impacted singing? Has it been a concrete influence on your own approach?

As has often been pointed out, microphones changed singing. Recording itself has created ghosts who live among us.

Autotune, with its focus on pitch alone, has been pretty reductive, though admittedly sometimes it is useful. Click tracks and drum machines have also had a powerful effect on singing.

Effect processing can be wonderful. We can compare its use to the slide between intelligibility and the seemingly involuntary aspects of singing. Though he's not a singer, if you consider the piano as a technology,  think of Thelonius Monk and his influence on pitch and rhythm to this day!

How do you approach mixing when it comes to the voice?

We say the voice has to sit in the track. Come to think of it, that is a pretty odd expression.

The relation between the voice and the downbeat, the one, can be the real story.

Motherese may have been the origin of music, and singing is possibly the earliest form of musical expression, and culture in general. How connected is the human voice to your own sense of wellbeing, your creativity, and society as a whole?

What about birdsong?