The Journey

Beginnings

As a singer I am interested in exploring the depth and breadth of human experience through the medium of the voice. My musical journey began in Ireland where I grew up. Ireland is full of music. Everywhere you go you hear it. Even the lakes, the valleys, the trees and the wind sing loudly in Ireland. There is often a mournful and haunting quality to these sounds which you can hear in Irish music, along with the more lilting and joyful music which you can hear in jigs and reels of people playing music...in kitchens, in pubs, everywhere!

My own journey with singing did not begin until I was older and had moved to California. I started to sing because I felt that I had to, and it eventually became a compulsion that I could not ignore. Being able to "give voice to one's own voice" is a mysterious and profound experience. For me, it is a way to express something that cannot be expressed any other way. It is sometimes a prayer or a longing, a way to commune with the "many places of the soul". The sounds, words and the melodies are what I bring back from these journeys; sometimes I can shape them into songs, sometimes not. When I was interviewed recently for the Tonehammer project, we talked about how musicians and singers are like blind bats trying to find their way in the world using their sonar. Creating music by using our own sound is the way in which we come to understand and eventually define our place in the world.

Language & Sound

I have always been intrigued by languages, especially ancient ones. Even though I grew up in Ireland, I never had the opportunity to learn Gaelic as it was the northern part of the country where the language has been all but banned in recent centuries. Sometimes I think I just invented a language to compensate for the one which I had never learned. This made-up language contains sounds and vocal nuances which are recognizably Irish in origin, but it also has many threads and pieces of other cultures & other "sound-words" which have been gleaned from the journey I have taken with music. Over the years, many of them have shaped themselves into a kind of language which is easy for me to sing in nowadays.

In the 90's I became fascinated with music from the Middle East. There is such depth and range of emotional expression in the voices and instruments which is hauntingly beautiful and incredibly complex. I absorbed much of what I heard in this music and translated it into my own form of expression where it merged with the some of the Irish influences. Some of this earlier work can be heard on the CD "Like the Dust" by Haunted by Waters. (see past projects). Oddly, this project was signed to a Persian-owned record label.

Sound & Healing

About 5 years ago, I became really interested in sound healing, chant & devotional forms of singing. From a local teacher named Silvia Nakkach (www.voxmundiproject.com) & Russill Paul (The Yoga of Sound), (http://www.russillpaul.com) I learned about the various streams of SoundYoga from India, known broadly as Nada Yoga. I started to work intensively with Vedic chants, Bija Sound Syllables, and the devotional call and response singing known as Kirtan. All of these ancient "spiritual technologies" are tools of transformation which utilize the voice as the primary instrument. To immerse oneself in these chants brings an immediate sense of transformation. It is very easy to enter extremely blissful or meditative states with these chants since many of them are designed to do exactly that. The power of the sound has very specific meaning and application in Sanskrit mantras. Mantra can be described as "particular subtle sound vibration capable of liberating the energy and consciousness of matter".

Along with this, I started playing the Indian harmonium, a type of small hand-pumped Indian organ. The harmonium really is the perfect instrument for a vocalist because it can be used both as a drone & as a melodic instrument. Since chanting and singing devotional music is a powerful way to develop a relationship with one's own voice, it is ideal for those who love to sing but do not consider themselves to be singers. Eventually I started facilitating SoundYoga groups, a sort of sonic journey using chant and voice. I began to write my own versions of chants and melodic improvisations, and other musician friends I had previously worked with magically reappeared. These SoundYoga groups were a great alternative to performance, since everybody is participating and reaping the rewards! Eventually through an organization called Green Music Network. I was introduced to other women singers and musicians who were doing similar work. This led to some performances of Vedic Chant in a Cave Concert & at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. The group SHAKINI eventually emerged out of these collaborations.

The beauty and power of the Sanskrit mantras have also found their way into my own work which continues to unfold in many unexpected ways, both as a solo artist and in collaboration with others. Voice is simply my form of expression, my way of responding to what I hear. There is no formula, there is no road and sometimes there's simply nothing. It's always an amazing feeling when something new comes through. There is often an emotional "recognition" of something deeper, and a profound & joyous feeling which accompanies it. I have learned to trust the journey and the expression. It seems that I don't really choose it, that it chooses me. The challenge is just to "get out of the way" and let it unfold, however it may choose to do so.