The God of Single Cell Organisms

Two voices share the listener’s focus on the opening track of Uncommon Deities, Jan Bang and Erik Honoré’s reimagination of the audio-visual installation of the same name staged at their Punkt Festival in 2011. First, David Sylvian reads Paal-Helge Haugen’s poem ‘The God of Single Cell Organisms’ in English translation, his precise diction crisply conveying the poet’s characterisation of a forgotten lesser deity who ‘in his impotence…seeks refuge among the microbes.’ As we grapple with the concept of a god who is so insignificant that ‘we cannot find him there, with our immense microscopes,’ a tight burst of bowed strings serves as the introduction to the second voice.

These ‘lines’ are sung but there are no words. The elemental vocal expression of Sidsel Endresen contrasts with the intricate description that preceded it. Vocabulary and literal meaning might be absent but what is conveyed is laden with expressiveness and emotion – like an instrumental solo performed with the human voice.

It’s difficult to pinpoint why hearing a singer vocalise without words feels so disconcerting – but that was certainly my response when first witnessing Sidsel’s art at Punkt in Kristiansand in 2011. So much of our musical experience is bound up in finding meaning in a song through the imagery conveyed by the language in the lyric or the narrative found there. Yet we all know that there is so much more that moves us in what a vocalist gives to a performance: the timbre, vibrato, a soaring rise in pitch, a gentle fading away. Here we experience those elements freed from the constraining framework of the definition of words. Human expression: disintermediated, pure.

It wasn’t always the case for Sidsel Endresen. Her first headline release was on ECM in 1990, So I Write, where she can be heard singing her self-penned lyrics alongside the trumpet and flugelhorn of Nils Petter Molvær, who later remixed David Sylvian’s ‘Mother and Child’ for the Camphor instrumental retrospective, and the jazz piano of Django Bates, who around this time was involved in the Rain Tree Crow sessions – albeit he does not appear on the final record. Over the coming decade Endresen’s records moved further from the traditional and crossed into more experimental territory. For 2000’s exquisite Undertow, Molvær is again present, with Audun Kleive moving from a compositional role on So I Write to drums and percussion. The pair contribute to a beguiling sound environment which envelops Sidsel’s vocal from ‘Western Wind’ at the album’s outset. Elements of a new philosophy would become increasingly evident on ensuing releases, leading ultimately to One (2006) where every sound on the record is generated by the human voice.

A little before the performances in Norway and Estonia that were weaved by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré into Uncommon Deities, Endresen explained her journey. ‘For the past ten to fifteen years, I worked a lot on finding out things about the voice. What the voice can do in addition to singing songs. And that’s been a good process for me.’

There was evidently a great deal of hard work and experimentation done privately before taking the bold step to expose the results to an audience. ‘It’s taken a long time before I took that work out of my own studio and presented it to listeners, to the public…The way I always work is that I like to work quite a bit on my own, so that I can evaluate things myself, without people having opinions about it. Because then I can sort of expand and see how far can I push this.’

The process was one of ‘working a lot, a long time on my own, not worrying about results, or other people’s opinions, or whether it works or doesn’t work, or whether it’s music or not music, or whatever. And then when I feel…that it’s starting to be music for me, so that it’s transcending the gymnastics of the voice or whatever, so that I feel that it has an artistic substance, then I can go and do further research together with others.

‘The point is that in order not to be careful, I have to be on my own.’ (2009)

Reflecting on these words brings home to me just how much graft and dedication was involved in shaping the building blocks of a new artistic process, and also how much courage is required to step outside of established parameters. I have heard the view expressed that because improvised performance is ‘free’ that somehow it must come ‘easy’ to the performer. Perhaps it’s a perspective built on the perception that somehow a traditional step has been skipped: that of creating or learning a composition. Having seen Sidsel perform on multiple occasions at Punkt over the years, I’ve always had the impression that every appearance necessitated a great deal of personal investment, that the vulnerability of being centre stage without the safety net of a conventional musical structure came at a cost. The creative urge to take this path must have been a powerful one.

‘When it came to exploring the voice, my main motive was the wish to do other things with it than simply carrying a song,’ said Endresen in a truly insightful interview undertaken by Adriana Carcu and published by AllAboutJazz in 2012 during the months between the Punkt festival’s 2011 edition and the release of Uncommon Deities. ‘I wanted to work improvisationally, and more instrumentally with the voice, so that I could be a true force in the way the music evolved. I wanted to be a real part of defining the form, texture and total sound.

‘I think that a voice is more like a channel. This is what I feel after working with it for so many years. It is the muscle that connects me with the world; an instrument I can use for that purpose. The other thing is that, being part of the body, it is very connected to my thought processes. There’s no filtering between, which is a good thing but, on the other hand, it can become very private, and I don’t want that to happen. I want to be personal but not private. There’s a fine line there.’

First inspirations in finding her unique musical expression came from exploring musical forms far beyond the Norwegian folk experienced during her upbringing or the Western pop influence from her years studying and living in the UK. In fact, both her background performing formally structured compositions and her academic studies in Anthropology were instructive.

‘When I was a younger musician I worked within very different musical genres, and with different parameters and structures without having any kind of pre-conceived concept. Later on as I started working more methodically, particularly with the sound modules, the basis was already there, through my continuous work with more straight material. So I had a deeply grounded departure point in straight, pre-organized material. This has proven to be all-important for me in my current work with free-improvisation.’

Perhaps jazz might seem the most likely genre for exploration but Endresen did not feel comfortable. ‘I think it was the mannerisms of jazz vocals, which I found a bit too night-clubby, too smoky, too languid. It is wonderful when it is genuine but for me to even contemplate emulating this was a no. Felt like acting. I’ve been through the Real Book and standards, and done my time studying jazz harmonies and more, but I never found myself there. I think I rather have a stronger affinity for pop, country and folksingers.

‘So, from an improvisational point of view, I looked elsewhere. I got into ethnic music forms from all around the world, from which I found a great source of inspiration because of the great variety of uses and functions of the voice. But this as a source of inspiration only. These traditional forms would take a lifetime to fully understand or handle – so you let it stream, you let it go through you. There is something with these textures, and the way these voices move, which attracts me enormously.’

It was all about the vocal sounds created and appreciating their characteristics in isolation from whatever a lyric might be saying. ‘I don’t understand Arabic, I don’t understand Chinese or Japanese traditional singing, I don’t know really what they are doing, but the sounds and the structures are very interesting to me. For me it was opening up all kinds of technical possibilities – what I can actually do with the voice.’

This research into a world of music beyond previous experience led on to the very structured experimentation in the privacy of the home studio. ‘I was spending twelve hours a day, for long periods of time, working with the voice, recording it, working down to phonetics, to sound cells, and trying to turn them into musical objects, something that could communicate with other musicians and other people as well. It is a long process. But I find that even my most experimental, more sonic voice work is based on my work with songs. The work I was doing for the first ten years was mainly pre-organised melodic material. So it is not like becoming, all of a sudden, a completely different person. It is all very connected, through time and experience.’

I find it fascinating that at the core of an improvisational practice is an extremely methodical approach to building a library of sounds as the vocabulary for use in free situations with other musicians.

‘I really try to achieve a happy marriage between my technical/cerebral musical self and my intuitive musical self,’ said Sidsel. ‘I always work very concretely when I rehearse or research—and when performing, I never focus on the “personal,” or on my feelings. On the contrary, I think one’s own feelings can be a real quagmire; it is not interesting. What is interesting is the music—in which I am just a channel.

‘Ever since I started singing, I have been very aware that my focus has always been on things like rhythmic parameters, phonetics, phrasing and form. Like how you shape a vowel or how you make a marriage of words and music. My focus was always more on all things musical than on the psychological content or the literary content of the text. I believe that the basic material (words and music) take care of themselves—and that if you overestimate your role as interpreter, you will kill it.

‘And the same now, when I work more sonically and improvised, my focus is on fields of energy, timing, beauty, harshness, speed and density, and so my technique is all about feeding the basic idea. Any catering to the wish to fill the music with “personal touches” or any other such strategic perfumes will ultimately drop you into a very porridge-like landscape, and will become a swamp that sucks you in and strangles you – and the music.’ There is however an intimacy in her singing that perhaps even transcends that of a virtuoso instrumentalist. ‘It is like an instrument but without the material filter all other instruments have. There is nothing in-between.’

Sidsel’s contribution to ‘The God of Single Cell Organisms’ is an improvised live performance recorded at a visiting Punkt festival event held in Tallinn, Estonia, in April 2011, a few months before the festival proper was held in Kristiansand with David Sylvian as guest curator. Her performance here is fragile and melodious. On other occasions her extemporisation can be much harsher, full of guttural attacks that chill the spine. Thinking of the analogy of the voice as musical instrument, the contrast is no more unusual than the range of, say, a trumpet or guitar, yet somehow it seems almost shockingly unexpected in a vocal context.

‘I think that one aspect of it is, to put it into very simple terms, that I don’t like too much of anything,’ reflects Endresen. ‘Something which is too beautiful, or too funky, gets soon to be too much for me. I like to build something and then to break it up because most of the time something else is emerging then…To work totally improvised is extremely attractive to me because it offers the possibility to create music now, to compose in real-time. And to be in a situation where you have to rely on and activate your total musical knowledge and let go of all your plans and strategies and go into a real dialogue with whomever you are playing with. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it is forever worth trying. It is always the process that interests me and not the product.’

The chemistry on stage with fellow performers is clearly an essential foundation for successful improvisation. At Punkt 2011 in Kristiansand it was Jan Bang, Erik Honoré and Sidsel who performed the ‘live remix’ of works by Dai Fujikura which had just been performed on the main stage by a string trio and clarinet. To witness new music being created in the moment was revelatory, samples from Fujikura’s work re-contextualised and then further responded to by Endresen.

The Norwegian music scene of performers is a discrete but rich one. Endresen: ‘We are a very small musical community, we know each other, we meet and interact. We have crossed the genre lines years ago and there’s been so much of this genre-free mixing that it has influenced all of us along the way, of course.’

Knowing one another on such a level engenders a trust that underpins musical collaboration. ‘It is a matter of affinity and stage development that help you synergise with the others. That’s what attracts me: when you don’t know what is going to come out of any collaboration. It is not connected to any particular instrument, it is mainly connected to the way people play and the sounds they produce. For example, I love the incredible roughness and wonderful and intuitive timing of [guitarist] Stian Westerhus. That is where we meet. I also love the tenderness and total clarity of Jan Bang and the way he organises his sounds together with his live samples along the way. He is so quick – and such a strong improviser.’

Jan and Erik’s finesse in drawing together disparate sounds is amply exhibited on ‘The God of Single Cell Organisms’. Bubbling beneath David Sylvian’s narration are cut-ups of Sidsel’s voice and snatched gasps of Arve Henriksen’s trumpet, together with string samples from the performance of Helena Tulve’s ‘stream 2’ at Punkt in Tallinn as the track segues into Sidsel’s vocal. It’s a masterful manipulation of the source material, creating an integrated whole that embraces both the sounds and the space in which they exist.

‘Once, in the beginning, he was a thought, without form or substance. Around this thought a membrane formed and a space where the thought could find nourishment.
He is older than everything, older than the world, older than himself.‘

Samadhisound released a video for the song online. It was commissioned from English artist and videographer Marc Atkins who filmed and edited the piece, with extra ideas contributed by Sylvian’s favoured visual designer, Chris Bigg.

For my playlist I like to surround the track with others from the key protagonists. Leading into ‘The God of Single Cell Organisms’ is ‘Sinking Ship’ from Jan Bang’s 2013 album Narrative from the Subtropics, which features both the trumpet and the falsetto vocals of Arve Henriksen above the saddest orchestral sample. To follow is ‘Sanctuary Revisited’ from Erik Honoré’s Heliographs (2014), with Sidsel’s voice to the fore. The signature touch of Erik and Jan enable the tracks to drift one into another, coalescing to produce an extended version of the Uncommon Deities experience.

‘Improvisation is a taboo-free zone,’ concluded Endresen in her 2012 interview. ‘It is a very joyful place to be for me musically…I am not a puritan when it comes to which form of improvisation I am working with, and that allows me to let things happen; even things which may not belong there but, if you keep doing it long enough, at some point they do start belonging.’

‘The God of Single Cell Organisms’

Jan Bang – samples; Sidsel Endresen – vocal; Arve Henriksen – trumpet samples;  Erik Honoré – samples; David Sylvian – voice; Helena Tulve – string samples; Ingar Zach – percussion sample

Music by Jan Bang, Erik Honoré and Sidsel Endresen. Text by Paal-Helge Haugen, English translation by Annabelle Despard.

Part 2 recorded live in Tallinn

Produced by Erik Honoré, from Uncommon Deities by Jan Bang & Erik Honoré, featuring David Sylvian, Sidsel Endresen & Arve Henriksen, samadhisound, 2012

Recorded and mixed by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré at Punkt Studio, Kristiansand

David Sylvian voice recorded by David Sylvian at samadhisound

Text © Paal-Helge Haugen

This article draws upon Adriana Carcu’s extensive interview with Sidsel Endresen for All About Jazz in 2012. Thank you to Adriana for her generous permission to quote from it for this piece. Read Adriana’s original here.

All artist quotes are from 2012 unless otherwise indicated. Full sources and acknowledgments for this article can be found here.

Download links: ‘Western Wind’ (bandcamp); ‘Sinking Ship’ (bandcamp); ‘Sanctuary Revisited’ (bandcamp)

Physical media: Uncommon Deities (as part of David Sylvian’s 10-cd boxset Do You Know Me Now?) (official store); Undertow (bandcamp) (Amazon); Heliographs (bandcamp) (Amazon)

‘For me, the voice is like having a very happy marriage between your intuitive musical self and your intellect. They don’t function well separately, and merging them takes a lot of time. Whenever I research something new I am more cerebral than intuitive, but then when I spend enough time working on these new parameters, it kind of clicks in where it belongs. In other words, being spontaneous requires a lot of pre-work.’ Sidsel Endresen, 2012

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