If Charmaine Lee loses focus during a concert ‘this whole thing can collapse'

Washington Post

a day ago

Think of all the things a musician can produce by contorting their vocal cords, from operatic wallops and birdsong trills to percussive raps and wordless scats. Now think of the voice as a tool used to express the gasps, gurgles, glottal stops, murmurs and mumbles that fill the space between words, like a Foley artist for the spoken word.
As an artist, Charmaine Lee is closer to the latter, speaking through a musical language of her own creation and using her voice in a way she says has been compared to 'Charlie Parker with a bunch of broken keys.'
While sonically reminiscent of experimental electronics and noise music, Lee's practice is actually an extension of her training as a modern jazz vocalist, growing out of a formal approach to free improvisation that she studied at the New England Conservatory.
'I'd always had this yearning for something weirder, a context that was stranger than I had previously had any real life experience in,' Lee says over Zoom. 'A lot of that lived in free improvisation … in the very few experiences I had, it was incredibly liberating and the most authentic way that I could express myself.'
Lee has spent a decade chasing that feeling, approaching composition and improvisation as creating obstacle courses to conquer in real-time and bringing herself to 'the edge of nowhere.' Her process has reached its apotheosis on her most expansive record to date, 'Tulpa,' which is due out on Oct. 31 via her new label Kou Records.
'Tulpa' is the result of four days in the studio with her partner, Randall Dunn, a producer known for his work in the worlds of black and drone metal that Lee describes as 'a master of amplification and feedback and tone.' Dunn set up an array of vintage tube amplifiers around Lee, splitting her signal through the amps to create different colors and shifts of feedback. The album takes its title from a term in Tibetan Buddhism that refers to the conjuring of an alternate being.
'This music feels like its own organism … and stretches me into new directions in ways that I've never done prior to that,' Lee says. 'To bring myself to that place where, if I lapse in focus or commitment, this whole thing can collapse … I find that very thrilling, life affirming and exciting.'
In concert, that experience is heightened by the existence and participation of an audience. Lee describes her performances as a 'wasabi shot' that wakes both artist and attendee to something that requires presence and invokes psychedelia. And after years at day jobs that never left much room for touring, Lee is hitting the road for a daunting schedule that will take her to all 50 states for more than 60 shows and nearly 100 days on the road.
Lee sees the tour as a durational performance that will evolve over the course of the tour, an opportunity to collaborate with like-minded artists in far-flung cities and a chance to learn about the country beyond the reductive conclusions driven by digital algorithms.
'This music, for me, is such a social practice. It's live, it's risk-taking, it requires a level of energetic participation and it's very specific to that exact context,' she explains. 'I want this tour to be larger than the act itself.' Aug. 14 at 7 p.m. at Rhizome DC. rhizomedc.org. $15-$25.