A Voice Through the Ether
Inspired by discovering Titian's timpano the Triumph of Love, Michael Curran met up with Chris Valentine on Valentine's Day 2022 to explore the music, themes and dreams of Valentine Lyons. Over a cup of tea the two go deep through hurricanes, soothsayers and castaway stars.
M – Today listening to Valentine Lyons, I am again surprised by the music's vibrancy, the way it acts on the listener like a subtle form of pollination or photosynthesis awakening the spirit. In exploring your creative partnership I'd like to ask you about voice, musicality, and collaboration, how the work is manifested.
Firstly what drew you to work together as Valentine Lyons?
C – Quite simply Trish's voice. We had worked together for some time in jams and experimental situations with Viralux, and the overwhelming sense I had in those sessions was the presence of Trish's voice. This way of working went on for several years and it was a really exploratory time during which I learned a great deal about sonic improvisation. From this I was inspired to try and create more of a soundscape, collage situation that featured Trish’s voice. I wanted to work with an electronic minimalist edge and put the voice more upfront. Trish seemed to imbue her lyrics with such emotion and drama – I thought: I want to try and surround this voice with sounds that compliment these qualities.
M – Giving it a form – or a structure – some kind of support?
C – Yes giving the voice an arrangement and structure to sit within - at the very centre. Trish’s voice set the bar high, so I knew it was going to be a stretch for me to create something that did service to her voice. She experiments a lot with register, tone, pronunciation, rhythm, different personas and a language which is inspiring to work with. As well as being sung – individual words and phrases stand out almost as audio objects. In cut and paste they become part of the musical arrangement and form the nucleus of that arrangement as well. For me, Trish’s voice was the key motivating force of how Valentine Lyons came into being.
There was a definite transition in our working together through the track DRIVING. The seed of that song was actually from a Viralux jam. It sounded completely different. You wouldn't recognize it, but I took that one jam away and thought – I'm going to work on that my own way. I removed everything apart from the voice and isolated the bits I thought constructed a kind of vocal narrative. I wanted to give some form to it in the sense of a song. That to me was important although some of our songs are not massively conventional they do have chorus and repetition. DRIVING is the one track that is arranged around a repetitive beat, but this fits with the sense of the road or ‘Lost Highway’. I think that Lynch's film visually informed the music a little.
M – So that was an essential beginning, making clear you were working with the voice – first and foremost as defining the structure. But weren’t you also composing with the voice via editing?
C – Yes I was basically composing with the voice and cutting and pasting it in the editing process. Trish and I would get together and jam and from those improvisations I would have a lot of what I call 'footage'(to use the film comparison) and perhaps there would be one or two phrases I would recognize as the anchor and then the other phrases would fit in around that – the repeating touchstone phrase would become a chorus. Very recently I listened to an old jam in which Trish came up with the phrase 'castaway stars' – on re-listening it went BANG! I thought – why didn't I notice that before? And then I began to construct a whole new piece around those words.
M – It's interesting tracing that journey from the improvisation – then to the process of extraction and there seeking and finding a composition within that. It’s akin to a mining process or a search for hidden treasure. The music is arriving through quite an open improvisation and then it’s your ear honing in on aspects of the voice and then onto a process of selection and editing.
C- Yes being inspired and led by the voice's explorations and finding these amazing moments that I try to establish as a core feature and developing other parts around it. That is a specific process of choosing fragments whereas in other pieces such as SHE the flow is already complete, coming through in a linear, sequential block of pure improvisation in the performance itself.
M – Yes! That moment when improvisation just flows unstoppably where at other times – it is more of a probing, a trying, a risking and a faltering.
C – In those situations it's a case of several takes around the same territory. The other thing I wanted was for the music to have that strong electronic base so that it has that kind of computer tempo from the digital realm but at the same time I wanted to make sure that it didn't become pedestrian like the boom boom boom metronomic beat of dance music. That was another challenging process to try and make the beats or the rhythm a kind of implied rhythm but not an 'overt' rhythm – so listening you divine a sense of it.
M – Yes I was getting that impression listening today. It's like a pulse or a heartbeat or a subterranean murmur creating the impression of a discrete action. Something I find very interesting is that the instrumentation doesn't seem like a digital simulation – the electronic music feels very organic – it is an aural conundrum in a way – there is some kind of growth occurring, a series of processes unfolding, a happening. Also, there are allusions and nods throughout to early medieval music, free jazz, bebop and eastern music.
C – A lot of the time Trish would come with ideas and stuff she's being listening to and books she’d been reading. In the title track of the album WE STARE HARD – there's a kind of jazz bit in the middle. The impetus for that came from a conversation that we both had about dramatically changing things or breaking a seemingly determined progression or expected direction, an interruption or digression. There are reversed guitar riffs in there. A lot of that kind of subversion came from Trish; we had a good fusion of ideas.
M – So she was offering you sound tastes and palettes to play with?
C - Yes that and some interesting bands that were around that I hadn't encountered or projects I hadn't heard of – there were some really current ones and I could hear they were subverting sound and technique so that was also a great input and a pointer for our direction. ‘Fever Ray’ and ‘The Knife’ were on both our playlist a lot during this time
M – It's interesting to talk about the work in terms of musicality and to explore its construction because you are talking about something which doesn't happen often enough – breaking the idea of progression and some of the very basic tenants of pop music – of verse chorus, break, verse chorus. It's subtly subverted in the music of Valentine Lyons. There is often a moment of going somewhere else within each piece. It's a bit like CHIC the 70s band – who are hugely underrated - with the break being really what the song was about – everything else was a little incidental around it, or in the form of a chant and then there was this incredible possibility to let the bass do something extraordinary! Again I found that today listening to your work.
Climax or catharsis occurs in unexpected places!
C - I think what is interesting is that while being subversive, the album does have a real pop sensibility. The other thing that I was and still am really into is in the way a song can develop or grow. Some of our songs reach a peak in the middle and then they don't end abruptly they slowly fade or withdraw. They rise from somewhere and disappear again.
M –. That's what I get from it – that there is this uncertain momentum, an ongoing movement that is taking place within which there are these small,significant eruptions or points of crisis.
C - Yes they feel like interrupted journeys … each of them are voyages. If I can achieve that – taking myself on a little journey while making the work – something is happening! I think getting back to the fact of making electronic music, in using the computer you do have to work really hard to subvert it – to take the computer out of the music.
M- I'd like to hear more about that. How did this whole endeavour impact you as a composer? This music made on a computer has so many different layers and associations and it feels like it holds the listener and that it possesses very warm and strangely organic properties and a bodily feeling is coming through.
C – There's a lot of symmetry in there – I love symmetry and stereo but taking that metronomic thing out of it and to try and not have too much repetition, although I like little bits where arrangements slip in and slip out which is quite traditional. For example sometimes I will jam a guitar over the top of things and that guitar will add a bit of looseness.
M- So again it’s cycling through origins in quite deep improvisation and a rearranging of elements? That's very like cut up and then re-composition ,like an exquisite corpse – a reformulation and building up and again this reintroduction of new elements of improvisation.
C- Moulding, shaping sculpting the music – there are links to sculpture, filmmaking and collage.
M – So it's processes, processes, processes! I really like this cadence – then a build-up and then disruption with something like a minuet – that moment in ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS. The song brings up a feeling of Courtly Love and of the Spring Dance.
C- Yes that's interesting because this was a Viralux track and not originally in 3/4 but 4/4. Giving it a waltz feel really opened up the directions for me but also the lyrics dictate quite a bit as well. All the Pretty Girls, All the Pretty Boys – there something there that already conjures a mood and gave me clues about where I could take it. Also the voice is so emotional and fragile as well! And it's slightly dangerous in its enunciation, All the Pretty Boys, All the Pretty Girls – there's a sense of subversion in that intoning and in that lyric about the medieval, the slightly dark medieval, which I think you interpreted in the two videos that you made for the song. I liked the one with the dancing marionette which was very unsettling and uncanny.
M -Yes that sequence was lifted from Fellini's 1976 film CASANOVA, where the infamous lover has an evening of entertainments with an automaton in a pretty pink dress – which in essence would be equivalent with what is now an AI sex-doll.
C- Yes! But also in the song there is the sense of gender experimentation as well. All the Pretty Girls and All the Pretty Boys – there is also something about fluidity there as well.
M – Yes I think it is good to mention such flexibility because often the songs have this non-binary openness about who is being addressed, who is speaking – like in CREATURES for example. Creatures we love only creatures ...There's a sense of sentience, an awareness, a consciousness, and it could be plant-life. There's a lot of inter-species feeling in the music and a sense of metamorphosis, of transformation and of fluidity. It's certainly the case that roles and masks are falling away also in SISTERS AND BROTHERS – it's a call to arms but those definitions seem interchangeable.
C- Also what is amazing about SISTERS AND BROTHERS is that Trish inverts that phrase! It's normally brothers and sisters but she says sisters and brothers and to me that is really significant.We are so used to saying, to all talk of brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters, always brothers first, but her phraseology completely unsettles expectation and unsettles the status quo.
M- That's such a wonderful observation! It rhythmically does something but it is because it is just so unexpected. I remember the first time I heard it and it really electrified me: (sings) Sisters and Brothers, Sisters and Brothers … It's calling you in a way you have never been called before. Also it has that danger and presentness, saying something is happening and it's happening right now. It feels like it’s unfolding in real time.
C- There's politics in there as well! There's a very subtle political enquiry in all of the songs.
M – It's engaged in the politic of so many things, of the voice, of the body, of the present moment, of history, of futures. To me none of it is reflexive – oh my lost love – reflecting back – speaking as a personal voice. It is singing into the now! And you are right it is something powerful to do with the voice and the text, something being spoken as it is occurring and that's really potent. In SHE, Depressing to have to judge the crimes of others … is something every day as an observation, but it is also historical, mythical and political –who is speaking? A citizen? A ruler? A god? And whose crimes are we talking about? It's a scrying of the times!
C – I think that's the thing with Trish's vocalizing – it really does feel oracular – her voice appears out of the ether, and that’s what I've tried to do with it, to work with that voice coming through the ether.
M – I've written down some words to describe the music:
CURSE
SPELL
INVOCATION
SCRYING
SOOTHSAYING
It is completely divinatory in its pronouncements. It’s that crystallization between the vocals and the instrumentation and how it all works together in this delicate geometry.
Can you say more about CASTAWAY STARS because it is the most recent piece and I don't really know it? Recent in the sense you came to an old recording late.
C – Yes it was a challenge! I found the recording and thought I can put something together. I was working through the material and at the same time was listening to something by The XX and their track was quite minimal and there was nothing much going on. Then I got my old JX synth out and I thought I'll find some chords on that and came up with the chords – thinking they're not great – a bit clichéd – but they kinda work. Then I think I'd done quite a bit of cutting and pasting the voice together and it took quite a bit of time going through that process of not trying to crowd it too much but to give it a gravitas, give the voice and the sound a gravitas. And again that whole thing of subverting the computer, having that sense of something going on in terms of tempo but not giving into a clear beat. That was again a good moment in improvising guitars giving the music a sense of freedom. As I've said that works, once you've got the 'machine thing' going you add something unpredictable in the soundscape – a very human touch- and that was very enjoyable playing over the track several times on different channels. It's a building up and a connecting to some of the words - like spiral galaxies. I was trying to bring about this idea of these great forces and clashing spheres, meeting, swirling, bouncing, and going off in different directions – waves formations ..actions and collisions in the Universe. I tried to sculpt those ideas into the music. Then with the voice there are sections of repetition in the castaway stars bit, but it has to be done so that it doesn't feel like a literal replication – the music isn't repeating but there is a reiteration rather like poetry – poets do reiterate – that's a part of poetry. Alliteration, repeating phrases, reintroducing key words. Trish's lyric improvisations feel like that – spontaneous poetry.
M – Absolutely! I would put the work totally in the realm of Poetry .. both voice and music. The composition is almost in a classical frame. I'm really excited by the way you are speaking about how the words are motivating and inspiring a wish to create the sense of spaces, actions, sounds. The mode is Poetry in the real sense that all lyric poets were singers. The use of the fragment also makes me think of Sappho who is one of Trish's greatest inspirations.
In SHE we have this ongoing, serpentine circularity and then there is this kind of zither – early lyre/ sitar moment when this strange supernatural, eastern inflected solo comes in. You’re in that process again of serving the voice and motivated to create these little jewel-like sonic episodes.
C – There's a brilliant track and I think it is off part of the Bowie Eno trilogy of collaborations – it's actually a piece by Brian Eno – an instrumental called ‘All Saints’. He does something there. He starts off small and he builds it up - it grows – it’s like an organism – it grows and fades away.
M – You hit on something there. I realise that I've listened to your music a lot over time. It has really held me through difficult states and there has always been that sense of it being a phenomenon that activates a proccess – that acts on the listener – an action and an expansion, allowing growth in the same way you describe the Eno piece. Valentine Lyons' music is music that acts on the body – that acts on the spirit.It's not doing that by any accident. It is actually coming to you, presenting itself to you and saying: Take my hand. Come on this journey. Earlier I was thinking of actions like pollination and photosynthesis, being seeded, fertilized, unlocked, actualized - it’s like turning towards different forces, properties and energies and being altered, being moved and realized by the music itself. There is a bio-alchemical possibility.
C – Yes all the tracks could be seen as different organisms evolving in a petri dish, or a crucible or indeed a computer. Organisms is a way I think about the tracks, they manifest in front of you and then slowly withdraw.
M – That's why I made the other video for ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS, which as well as being fluid, is in other ways very gendered. It concerns mating rituals. Such rituals returned me to St Valentine's Day. I'd been thinking about that conjoining of one of your stage names – Chris Valentine with Trish's family name Lyons – The heart and the lion – Valentine Lyons as an emblem of Love. Traditionally Valentine's Day was cast as the time in which all the animals were beginning to mate and humans would come together to exchange favours and there would be dancing leading to courtship – so I wanted to emphasise the sex that underlies these rituals. This romancing, this 'hanging on the moon' concerns the propagation of life form – and in the video the sperm making its way into the ovum marks the continuation of species – a certain biological imperative - the video speaks of generation and the generative.
C – Yes you shed a different light on the song opening out to an interpretation that maybe I did not feel. I always thought with the marionette version there was a more conventional uncanny and macabre approach which I really liked but also the other aspect of the song (and video) is more abstract again I think.
M – Yes but here the key is the sense of the generative and this means generating movement, generating life, generating love, generating change, generating all kinds of things! That is what is so powerful about your music – it can allow these scenarios but there are infinite visions available. The music has a complexity and capacity to be interpreted quite endlessly. And for me making the visual work was … it wasn't that it was necessarily easy technically – but there was an ease in the way I felt invited by the music to respond. There were many vivid associations and meanings being proffered in all of the tracks I worked on. Making the video for CREATURES – in a fever, largely created in one night,was a very direct response to all the vulnerability, awareness and sensitivity there. For me it is a song about cruelty – so going to the life of animals and the pain of all animals – and human tyranny was very instinctive. That work opened out something extremely surprising for me with its references to sentinence, the anthropomorphism of the white cuddly dog puppet, then moving to the lives of stray and wild dogs on the street- socialising, fighting, fucking, protecting and nourishing their young and navigating their way through precarious existences. All of this was very unexpected and directed purely by the music.
While that was an edit containing many things, SHE needed nothingmore and nothing less than an image of the ultimate She – Medusa! A song to the Great Goddess – to The Mother, to the Vengeful One, to the Oracle, because she, Trish Lyons she, is screaming like a Sibyl gone wild, the Cassandra, the Maenad crying: Dionysus told me! And at the same time there is an urgent cry for the World as it is right now in all its apocalyptic realities and forecasts. We are being turned to stone by our own sense of powerlessness. It is like She is screaming from the top of the volcano, the site of the castastrophe! These cries and prophecies are held by that sinuous, undulation beneath … … She's your sister, She's your mother, She's your brother …
C – Is there a word for it .. like Miasma? Some kind of ferment, an emanation, vaporousness?
M – Yes a bubbling – a coming into focus – then going out – a fata morgana – the bad air of human folly, again – a voice in the ether!
C – Yes! SHE seems to speak across the Ages. The whole concept of SHE and the way it’s framed and the way Trish gives it this ancient kind of stretch or reach that echoes right into today.
M – Absolutely! It is the Ancient and the Everyday. From the becoming present moment and deep deep Time.
C – Yes and the sense of woman and women living across this stretch – I wail for my Children! It has that fierce political edge saying something about the fraying of society and civilization and World Pain and also this still patriarchal society that we all live in.
M – To me the songs are like news flashes. There's the sense of them being reportage. Where do they come from? They could be from another planet. It's the messenger, the war correspondent or the lyric poet bearing witness amidst the flames. Yes, bearing witness which I know has always been important in Trish's writing and artmaking.
Finally WE STARE HARD is such an odd title.
C- It's one of those phrases that stops you in your tracks and makes you say it out loud!
M – It's got that idea of the alien somehow throughout. We've got this idea of the newsflash but also we have the alien there – We Stare Hard – again identities float – who's voice, whose view is this, is it us and our human condition, being caught by illusion or desire – but then also – it's another voice …from another place.
C- Yes that's right. There is another voice prophetic and alien. There's something in this phrase – we stare hard – when would you really use that in a conversation? It's who are the We? Who is staring hard? And at what? Yeah, musically that was surprising – there's that massive change in the middle where it goes off on its jazzy thing and then slowly returns. That was difficult bringing the tempo back to that Portishead like lurch.
M – Yeah – there's a kid of drudge about it in a way – it plods.
C- Yes it's restrained! That's something about the arrangement it’s slightly held back, but then it explodes into something else and then returns to restraint.
M - It's curious. I find that is can evoke many responses ...but it is something, for me and I think we are all experiencing it at some level, about the possibility of another future, or another outcome, it's not even as a big future .. it is just the possibility to go in another direction, take another route and that there is something holding that at bay, but it still rises up – these unexpected moments of real exhilaration.
C – Like epiphanies?
M – The appearance of that ‘solo’ is quite radical amid the melancholic swim through heavy waters and then suddenly a go where you will exuberance! I suppose it’s about waiting, suspension and stasis because you’ve got that – “dancing ankle deep in milky stars”.
The songs explore uncertainty and discovery. Indeed it’s been so surprising talking together and what has come up in our conversation! I suppose in drawing to a close and in all that has been said, I still feel there is somewhere else for Valentine Lyons to go both in terms of the music that is already there – that needs to be heard – and of the music that is perhaps yet to come? I think there is still a lot that can be done with working long-distance as you have this amazing practice but I am curious since you have never played live what your ideal circumstances would be for a live performance?
What could be next manifestation for Valentine Lyons?
C – Well now I have an accordion and Trish is playing bass. We are both learning a new instrument. I also think of the high, contralto aspect of Trish’s voice and think we could almost do live performances with just accordion, voice and bass. So that is maybe something for the future now that things are starting to open up a little and perhaps as travel again becomes easier but also there is the opportunity to work remotely – the space of online liveness is interesting. Also there remains a resource within the original recordings if I keep going through the material, there are more songs to be extracted.
I am interested to continue working with that quite crafted song structure arising from all the methods I have spoken about already but having heard Trish recently experiment with loops on bass I am interested to do work live in a very experimental and durational way and see where it takes us.
I see tiger lilies, new boots and the beginning of another unexpected voyage into the miasma!
