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Published on 7/4/08
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Despite what she might sound like, Carol Genetti doesn’t speak in tongues when she performs. Nor does she consciously intend any pathos. “I guess it comes out as sounding emotional because it’s coming from the nervous center in the body,” the experimental vocalist and improvisor says between sips at a South Loop coffee shop. “Someone thought I was channeling some goddess, someone called me a ‘screamer,’ but usually people are really into the fact that somebody can get up there and do something so exposing.”
This weekend at Links Hall, audiences will see why Genetti, the only Chicago performer doing her brand of work, elicits such extreme responses. While she is warm and amiable—even giddy—in person, she’s an iconoclast of a performer. Whether she’s ululating, scatting, shrieking or just employing Western-style singing, she looks to other cultures for inspiration.
Genetti studies and practices Hindustani music, with its complex modes and unorthodox techniques, even though the music rarely makes it into her performances untransformed. “Western-style singing ends up here [Points to her nose], but with Bulgarian you focus on the back of your head. And with the Hindustani stuff, it’s on the chest. There are so many ways to use the voice no matter what culture you are in. But in things like American Idol, everybody sings the same.”
Raised in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota (a small suburb of St. Paul), Genetti sang in school choirs growing up but viewed singing as a way to goof off rather than a serious pursuit. Instead, she studied visual art and eventually came to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute in 1991. It was in classes at the sound department at SAIC where she realized that the same switches and wires that made the original synthesizers function could be found, in a sense, inside the human voice.
ECHO, the piece Genetti performs this weekend, combines many of the threads that have long fascinated her—improvisation, recording technology, performance art—into one of her boldest works yet. It’s inspired by the passing of her mother as well as the way sounds and recordings get transferred to successive generations. As Genetti sees it, because recording technology has allowed us to preserve people’s voices when they die, “That’s really changed our view of death and nostalgia.” ECHO is also informed by experimental pioneer Alvin Lucier’s famous “I Am Sitting in a Room,” where a recording of a recording of a recording of someone speaking is made, ad infinitum, until a dissonant overlapping begins to occur. But instead of recording a text, Genetti uses a family instrument. “I grew up with this piano that was really fucked up and out of tune. That really influenced me because some of the keys don’t even have a hammer anymore—it’s just kind of a thud.” She recorded it onto vinyl and will play recordings of it over and over as the physical vinyl literally decays before your ears.
“Our relationship to the outside world is much different than it used to be,” Genetti says. “And that has really affected how we perceive the voice.”—Matthew Lurie
Carol Genetti performs ECHO at Links Hall Friday 17 to Sunday 19.
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