Part 2

What are the potentials and limits of your voice? How much of your vocal performance can and do you want to control?

The voice is such a fragile thing. An instrument that is literally you – your body, your means of expression – although also something beyond you – something “invisible” and very stubborn, something very difficult to place under conscious regimes of control.

And “control” itself is something strange: as it implies a constant antagonism of being focused and self-aware, rationalizing your body and your movements, but also the feeling of “letting go”. Some of my own best performances, in my view at least, are ones where I did find and enact such a contradictory sense of “control”.

That said, I also believe that every professional musician needs to develop techniques of self-monitoring and self-correction, as it is very easy to develop certain incorrect or unhelpful habits, which might render both the technique and the performance more difficult, presenting obstacles.

For me, this becomes particularly pronounced when I am touring. If the touring schedule makes me skip my daily practice regiments and routines, I noticed that I easily tend to develop some strange minute bodily habits, which translate into frequencies in my vocal timbre which I dislike.

But then again, it is a constant struggle: against one’s own limitations of the body, against unwanted habits, against unpleasant musical settings or environments in which one is often placed, against the terror of bad acoustics, etc. Even if I find renewed pleasure in this struggle.

As a singer, it is possible to whisper at the audience, scream at the audience, reveal deep secrets or confront them with uncomfortable truths. Tell me about the sense of freedom that singing allows you to express yourself and how you perceive and build the relation with the audience.

I scream, I whisper, I shout, I wail, I hiss, I cry on stage, sometimes sounding like a wounded animal – but all this is not directed at the audience and I do think that it is a matter of being free.

I cannot say that I directly communicate on stage – certainly not directly with the audience. I communicate primarily with the musical development – with the musicians with whom I share the stage and with whom I am performing, and also with myself. But this is almost a “private language” – a language happening in the moment, secretly shared by those “in the know”.And yet, it is through this distance, this detour from direct address, where I believe that we actually bring out our artistic message.

So, being “expressive” is not something which reveals deep “truths” about oneself, or communicates moods or affects – it is simply a part of improvisation, of the language of musical creativity, which is always in the making.

It is not about “me” and “my freedom” – or expressing my inner states without inhibitions. Rather, and quite to the contrary, it is often an expression of very constrained procedures, a matter of leading a dialogue, and being entirely self-aware in its unfolding. This is where music happens.

I'd love to know more about the vocal performances for Poravna, please, and the qualities of your voice that you wanted to bring to the fore.  

The new album is entitled Poravna, which would translate as “flat” or “straight”, but also “elongated” or “flattened”. The word in fact is an idiom of the entire genre of Bosnian “Sevdah” music, as it depicts a type of singing through “long breath” – which means through an elongated phrasing of melodic lines, interspersed with numerous melismatic ornaments on vowels.

I know this genre of traditional music very well, as I have been exposed to it since my childhood – but the idea for making something with it came accidentally as I stumbled upon a recording of a radio show from the sixties by Bosnian composer and ethnomusicologist Vlado Milošević who was recording amateur singers in villages and small towns around Banja Luka.

Some of these performances were very enchanting – very clean, with a straight and flat tone, colored by fast ornaments which sounded more like Western scales than makams, upon which this music is traditionally based, and also with a very controlled and minimal sense of vibrato. It was almost like Billie Holiday singing oriental pentatonic music. And I immediately thought that this form could prove very fruitful once translated into an experimental musical setting.

But getting to work on this demanded a rather lengthy and complex process of preparation: first and foremost, by learning the traditional singing techniques and styles, which I approached through imitation and analysis, but also by getting in touch with some traditional musicians. It was a very long process: how to find the right tonal and timbral balance, the correct bodily support, the right usage of breath, the pronunciation of the consonants.

So I had to invent many exercises, many practice tricks, some which worked for specific songs and specific tonalites but not for others. For each of the songs I had to revise my technical approach. And I must to admit that I probably have not learned more about my voice then trough this single process.

When you're writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text? Does it need to feel and sound “good” or “right” to sing certain words? What's your perspective in this regard of singing someone else's songs versus your own?

When I write lyrics I am very picky with words – they should by themselves convey a certain sonorous sense beyond the actual linguistic sense that they have. Words should already be the body of the melody and the phrase. Particular consonants and vowels need to be thus carefully placed, melting with the logic of the melody.

When I write in my native language, I try to respect the natural linguistic accents of words, which is a rather old-fashioned approach – and certainly more difficult – but I find that it produces more beautiful results.

Strain is a particularly serious issue for many vocalists. How do you take care of your voice? Are the recipes or techniques to get a damaged voice back in shape?

Daily practice regiments, taking things slow and methodically, resting often – resetting things completely when needed, even resetting one’s technique. For I am particularly encouraging of all engagements in specific technical explorations, which always involve a lot of trial and error, and where there is always an unknown to deal with.

As there is no universal technique, one needs to find things which work for you, or for the context and the material that you are approaching. My own case is very specific here – as I perform across different musical genres, but also in different languages, so I am very often forced to alternate between different vocal techniques.

Singing jazz material in English, for instance, demands a very different control of the voice, the breath, the throat, the tongue, from singing Bosnian traditional music, or singing pop music in Serbo-Croatian. Or to give you another contrast: using extended techniques in an improvised music setting and then getting back to very clean and controlled phrasing for a pop gig.

These are all specific challenges which do produce strain – but somehow so far I have been managing to be on top of it.

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

I always like to listen to it. Jay Clayton, for instance, was combining effect processing and singing so masterfully and so beautifully.

But somehow, so far it never attracted me to try these things out by myself. I always felt that I would rather spend hours exploring the different timbres of my own voice and my own body.

For recording engineers, the human voice remains a tricky element to capture. What are some of the favourite recordings of your own voice so far and what makes voices sound great on record and in a live setting?

That is very much true. I was lucky to be able to record my recent albums in great studios and with great engineers, like Adrian von Ripka.

There are a lot of engineering and technological aspects of this process, of which I become very aware – from the microphone and its preamplification (and also cabling – the audiophile in my attests!), to the placing of recording equipment, the room acoustics and reverberation, but also the mixing and processing, etc. The variables are almost infinite – and in the end the recorded result is always different.

But I long ago discarded the idea that recordings are here to capture something “as it really is” – their point is to, and the true mastery is how to make this illusion a beautiful one.

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?

I would not go so far to make such deductions. Wars, violence and destruction have their songs and singing too – as do activities in which we express our solidarity, our empathy, our love.

Singing does calm me down –yet it can also get me very annoyed, if a lingering technical obstacle which I am trying to overcome for hours stubbornly persists.

But I love it nevertheless. I cannot imagine doing anything else.