Vocal dis/obedience

Anjeline transcript

Emma: Hello and welcome to another episode of Sonic Interventions, a series hosted as part of the Research Center on Intervening Arts at the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. My name is Emma Lo. I'm a researcher and artist focused on the intersections of sound, technology, and diaspora. It is my true pleasure to sit down today with Anjeline de Dios, a writer, singer, teacher, and reader based in Manila, who is currently in Berlin to participate in several performances.

Emma: I had the honor to hear Anjeline perform as a part of the Decolonial Frequencies Festival at Ballhaus Naunynstraße last year, and her vocal and intellectual practices have made a big impression on me. Anjeline, thanks so much for joining us today at the Freie Universität for this conversation.

Anjeline: Really glad to be here, Emma. Thanks for the invitation.

Emma: So for our unfamiliar listeners, could you please introduce yourself and your practices?

Anjeline: So I am a chant artist working with my voice. And what I do is I use my voice, I use my practice of improvised singing to create spaces of listening for people.

Anjeline: And these spaces of listening can vary from meditation rooms and private sessions in the vein of what's commonly called sound healing, to more experimental and explicitly artistic spaces like performances, residencies. Parallel to all of that, I am a researcher. I did my PhD in Geography. And the kinds of things that I do with my voice are very much informed by the questions that are formed by my research as a cultural geographer, looking into listening and sound and how that interacts with space.

Emma: So you've just described the different facets of your practice, which seem to be at the intersection, and kind of the persistent intersection of arts, wellness, and academia, which we've already talked a little bit about. You are holding on to this in-betweenness. Could you elaborate on this, please?

Anjeline: Yeah.

Anjeline: I'm really grateful that you would describe it in such generous terms, holding on to an in-betweenness. I think at this moment, the way I would describe it is that it's, uh, the insistence on being in between these different fields. That sometimes overlap, but most of the time stay in their lanes and I'm talking about the fields of academic research, artistic, contemporary artistic performance and healing.

Anjeline: Uh, the reason why I insist on staying in between almost like in this little island. Where you have all these cars whizzing about and I'm sitting there in the island deciding where to go. It's born out of a primary experience of uncertainty, I think, which I find really fruitful. Um, I like to say that a lot of my work is driven by a sense of dissatisfaction.

Anjeline: And the dissatisfaction comes from engaging with the field and with, or the genre for a long period of time, and then, you know, learning the rules, learning from teachers, learning from authorities, whether it's as a classical singer, or as a trained academic, or somebody who has some kind of background experience with spiritual disciplines, and then realizing that, yes, these rules, conventions, traditions, and practices are valuable because they give some kind of legibility to the work, but there is this kind of primal, like I said, dissatisfaction and almost, I wouldn't know how to describe it, but in everyday language, we, I think you know exactly what I'm talking about, but there's this feeling of, “Ehh is this it!?” I would kind of phrase it in these kind of almost adolescent questions, like, “is this it? Do I have to?” Do I have to is a strong one for me. And then ultimately, it became this question of where this voice wants to go. Like I've always had this sense of my subjectivity or of my voice, whether in my feelings, in my opinions, in my realizations, as I'm engaging with more external and legitimized forms of creative production or even spiritual practice, there's this always underlying sense of a very kind of simple autonomy that likes to express itself as a kind of disagreement, that little kind of disobedient feeling inside the self. I've made it my practice to listen to that little disobedient feeling.

Emma: And that you find something generative, creatively generative about this, this place of disobedience or dissatisfaction.

Anjeline: For sure.

Emma: And maybe this also does relate to what we were discussing about your vocal practice of leaning into awkwardness or moments, vocal expressions that don't fit the formal expectations, which is maybe another way of expressing disobedience. Could you maybe describe this journey that you're on with vocal expressions?

Anjeline: Yeah, I could start by saying a little bit about my background as a vocal performer. So I grew up in a really musical family. I grew up in a middle class urban English and Tagalog speaking family in Manila where many of my family members loved playing music. Some of them were professional musicians. Many of them were professional level musicians who didn't earn music for a living but treated music as a very deep, communal, and personal experience. So I grew up loving singing. I think I was possibly about five years old when I, uh, had an experience of myself singing and putting myself into a trance, like singing to myself as children will do.

Anjeline: And that early experience imprinted itself on my memory somehow. But as I grew older, of course, growing up in a family where, you know, as a kid, you want attention, you want the adults to shower you with praise, so that feeling of wanting to be heard and that internal feeling of there's something coming out of me when I sing and I don't know what it is but it's, uh, I would say now, you know, with the language of an adult that it's a numinous feeling, you know, it's like a brimming feeling that's quite hard to put into words, but those two experiences of my voice were there from the very beginning, so this more internal experience and this more external experience. In the Philippines, if you're a female with a nice voice, there are very set paths to take because there are standards of beauty, of sounding good, that you don't even stop to realize whether they're external or not, you just pick them up right away.

Anjeline: And then it becomes this automatic process of needing to form your voice, which is such a, if you think about it, it's like a sonic appendage. You know, it's as much a part of you and your body, of your body, in your body, but beyond your body as an arm or a leg. Um, it has that kind of corporeal, but also kind of transcendent quality from a very early age to assume and to believe and accept as truth that it has to be a certain way.

Anjeline: It's the pathway to great art, but it's also the pathway to great neurosis. So like many other singers, like many other young kids and young girls who love to sing, and especially in a Catholic context, in a Philippine Catholic context, where, uh, singing with other people and hearing your voice become part of this swell of voices.

Anjeline: Not necessarily beautiful or ugly, but just all singing songs to god also kind of formed my, my biographical and my, my aesthetic experience of my voice or something. That was very personal to me, but also something that kind of escaped any personal preferences that I had.

Emma: Right.

Anjeline: So yeah, I became a choral singer.

Anjeline: I love pop music. I grew up listening to the radio and radio in the Philippines is drenched in American and in a very certain strand of nostalgic 80s, 90s, popular music. Ballads and love songs and melancholic songs are very much the flavor. Very vocally heavy repertoires. I like pop music. I love rock music.

Anjeline: But I was, I frequently had an experience of my voice as kind of not right for these genres. They weren't, my voice somehow wasn't bombastic enough, or maybe it was, or it felt like too plain or too soft or too high. A lot of sopranos will have that kind of experience of their voice that it's too thin and too high.

Anjeline: So I became a classical singer. So like, okay, where does a girl with a thin high voice go? She goes to become a soprano in a choir, which is a beautiful experience. I think my kind of classical pedagogical approach to singing and forming the voice really gave me formative experiences of what it means to work with the material of your voice like it was almost like clay or some kind of material of color that you work with. You know, watercolor is different from oil. You know, this vowel is different from that vowel. So I had the really early experiences of constructing, undoing, and working through the voice, but under the surface I always again felt this little disobedient dissatisfaction that why do I keep giving my voice away to make other people happy, and then I still don't feel like I can bear to hear myself.

Emma: Now, I guess shifting from vocal expression to the topic of listening in your biography, you describe your personal aspiration to “help people listen better to the life within and beyond themselves.” And I wonder if you could reflect with me about your own journey with listening. How did your interest in listening develop, maybe in relationship to expression?

Emma: And are there any listeners in your life that you find particularly inspirational?

Anjeline: These are really juicy, beautiful questions. So thanks, Emma, for bringing them to me. I think my relation to listening, um, there's a temptation for me to trace it to some originary moment, which I'll probably have to do anyway, because it's, it's a way in for sure.

Anjeline: I think my first conscious memory of listening is listening to the radio at four years old to a station that my Yaya or my nanny had put on during one of my naps. So very, I'm sure I must've listened to many other things before that, but that's the one that has the most imprint on me. And the radio was playing Paul McCartney's “No More Lonely Nights.”

Anjeline: And, um, there was a turn in the melody that I remember very distinctly made me cry. (Singing) “You're my guiding light, day or night, I'm always there. And I won't go away.” So when the melody kind of descends into this line where it goes from this open hearted longing like “no more lonely– this declaration of relief that's also a declaration of this indescribable sadness, you know, like “no more lonely nights, but I've had so many lonely nights!” And then it kind of descends into this kind of a feeling of resolution where the singer declares that I'm not going to go away. Of course, I didn't know any of that. You know, I couldn't conceptualize that at all as a four year old, but the way I'm explaining it now, I'm recounting the affective impression, as a four year old.

Anjeline: I mean, this is my shorthand answer for why Filipinos like sad songs so much because our ears are kind of drenched in this sonic melancholy, and there are many reasons for that. But that was my first experience of listening. And I guess another biographical originary moment for me that I'm reconstructing really from stories of my older family members, is my sense of myself as being super talkative and super quiet at the same time. And my mom always used to say that, uh, “you know what, you were completely silent, you were a thumbsucker, observing everything. And then we were starting to worry why you weren't saying any words. And then when you first started speaking, at three years old, you started, um, speaking in full sentences and then you wouldn't shut up.”

Anjeline: So, and my father, I think, this to answer your second question in terms of, uh, listeners that have been influential to me. My father had the same kind of quality that he was super extroverted. He was also a singer, loved the theater, was a natural showman. He had this kind of ringing, this kind of ringing resonant voice that people could hear from the other end of the room.

Anjeline: And he was also extremely introverted and I could tell just watching him and watching his body language that he was listening because he would usually kind of close his eyes and fold his arms and kind of bend his head a little bit. So you could feel that he was listening with his whole body. So that was something that I claim, something that I claim as part of my identity, I'm named after him too. So that would be one kind of major listener that I look up to. But I mean, to go to the previous question about why I insist that my own ambition as an artist and as sound practitioner, interested in healing, is to help people listen better to the life within and beyond themselves.

Anjeline: This is an ambition or an aspiration that's totally informed by my spiritual practice. And I understand that for people who don't have a spiritual practice, for various reasons, for trauma, for... you know, their own political beliefs, I completely respect that. And yet, there's the capacity of sound to transcend, you know, whatever differences of belief and cognition that we, and experience that we all have.

Anjeline: And that to me is really fascinating as a researcher. So I have my skeptical hat on as a researcher, but I'm a skeptic who frequently has experiences that some people would describe as mystical. Um, and those are ordinary occurrences for me where I'm kind of soaked with a certain feeling of gratitude and connection and freaky circumstances that always frequently that, that, you know, that in my frame and in my phenomenological understanding signify that there's a…I'm connected to something greater and that there's something greater is listening to me.

Anjeline: So that's the, you know, and that the something greater is something that's so deep inside of me that it's so deep inside of me and so deep behind me even that it doesn't really come from any rational conception of the self. And yet this very private sense of sadness, you know, whatever the affect may be, it may be sadness, it may be ineffable sense of joy, it may be, uh, you know, boredom is also a very good portal. Many people know that feeling that you're so deep into your boredom that you can practically see the molecules passing in front of you, right? And then the moment passes, right? You get a message on your phone or, or, or you need to cross the street, or, you know, the water's ready, so you have to make your coffee or your tea and then it's gone. Um, but these kind of micro moments of ineffability and luminosity are what anchor my spiritual practice. It's just that I grew up Catholic and I practice Buddhist meditation and I'm interested in psychedelic tradition and psychedelic therapy that I put framings around this, but that's the aspiration. And I think the reason why I became so dissatisfied too as an academic was because I was having all of these experiences in my personal life as a woman, as an artist, as a Filipina living in other places and talking to people from other places, but constantly reflecting on my cultural identity.

Anjeline: All of that was happening at the same time, I couldn't bring it into the conversation. You know, I couldn't talk about it in a theoretical or critical way and that kind of fragmentation I think frustrates me.

Emma: Yeah, but I also see this as a kind of disobedience to refuse to let go of these fragments and to hold on to them, all of them simultaneously as well, even if it’s not easy.

Anjeline: Yeah, that's a beautiful way to put it. Yeah, yeah, it's a...that holding on, that you're – that refusal to let things disintegrate is kind of an – one way to look at this is as an integrative, integrative impulse.

Emma: Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting. So in your research and in your practice with your background in cultural geography, you connect sounding and listening to space and creative labor to space. You've, your doctoral thesis addressed locations of creative labor featuring your field research in cities across East and Southeast Asia.

Emma: So I was wondering if you wanted toshare some about this research and about how you conceptualize sounding and listening in relation to space.

Anjeline: Yeah, so my research for the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore was about Filipino migrant musicians. And the decision to focus on this group of musicians, uh, was exciting academically, but in real life and in private conversations with Filipino studies scholars and, you know, serious ethnomusicologists, I received a lot of disapproval.

Anjeline: Because when I would tell people that I'm interested in looking at overseas Filipino musicians, the assumption from these kind of older, mostly male ethnomusicologists was that, “you must look at the earlier generation of Filipino musicians, you know, the jazz men, uh, who were working on the cruise lines and who were very instrumental.” But when I would tell them that, “No, I'm interested in the bar bands and the hotel bands and the cruise ship bands and the bands in the theme parks, some of whom come from music conservatories in the Philippines.” Some of them were actually my friends, which was the initial reason why I thought that this would be intriguing to get into. And I was always met with disapproval because there was this perception that these musicians were somehow subpar, that they weren't really good musicians, they were bringing the reputation of the Filipino musician down.

When I would talk to foreign scholars and audiences about my research topic, I would always be faced with this very puzzling, vaguely insulting, but also well-meaning question of: “Um, you know, Filipinos have this reputation for being so talented. Your musicality is in your blood, but how come you don't write original music?” There would always be this hook, like, “but how come you don't write your own music?” I think not only as a Filipino, but as a Filipino with some of my friends being these musicians, I naturally took offense. But then I found myself frustrated because I couldn't come up with an answer. And I felt pressured to come up with an answer. So part of me took a step back and thought. Why do I need to justify it? Why do I need to justify the choice of music that they make? And in spite of this wonderment, why do I myself feel uncomfortable with the fact that maybe compared to Indonesians, for instance, or to Thai or to Thai musicians, there's not that kind of mainstream engagement with quote unquote “indigenous” Filipino, well, some of them are actually indigenous, but then I'm talking indigenous here as a social construction.

Emma: Right, right.

Anjeline: Why are Filipinos ignorant of, say, the kulintang or other kinds of... of Babaylan music or, or any, any of these traditions in the way that we see in such a developed form, say for instance, in Indonesian culture, you know, why can't we love ourselves more? It's a very kind of contested way to put it, like, why aren't we used to listening to ourselves more? So these are very difficult questions that don't have one side to them.

Anjeline: So my approach to answering these questions was to talk to the musicians themselves, and I'll never forget one conversation I had with a very well known trumpeter I met through friends who was working in Hong Kong to become a marching band member in a well known theme park that I can't mention for ethical reasons, but there's only one big, huge theme park with a very popular mouse as its mascot. And then I asked him, in all the naive, well-meaning ignorance of a first year doctoral student, “why did you leave to, you know, become a musician abroad?” And he just looked dead at me and he said, “because I need the money.”

Anjeline: (both laugh)

Anjeline: So I think in the process of my listening to these musicians and understanding that the work they do, so the work that they do is that they perform covers. They themselves wouldn't really call it covers. “Covers” is a term that's given by people outside the live band music sector. They're not impersonators, but they are sonic impersonators, and that's the whole nature of their game.

Anjeline: They qualify their labor as a listening labor, because they imbibe this popular music repertoire. You know, before the internet, people would literally kind of press their ears against the tape player. Before internet, they would have to kind of pick out and transcribe the lyrics, the chords, everything by ear.

Anjeline: And then they would reproduce, I mean, but reproduce is also like an inexact term because they perform it live, right? They embody it for the audience that is not there for them.

Emma: And transform it.

Anjeline: Yes, and transform it. But there is a standard of aesthetic fidelity to the recorded sound because the job is to please the guests.

Anjeline: And the guests of the theme park, the hotel, and the bar, they're not there for the musicians themselves. But as one musician told me, “if you play one bad note and you're a businessman tired from a really long day and you just want to have a nice drink, you know, that can ruin your whole evening. But if you just randomly wander into a bar and you hear the band playing a song that has so much personal significance to you, then that transforms your whole evening.”

Anjeline: You know, so there's this element of serendipity. There's this labor of entertainment, of hosting, of graciousness. Many of these musicians also have to frequently interact with guests. And of course they take requests, you know, scribbled on paper napkins, which people still do. So that was their labor.

Anjeline: Again, I mean, frustration as you probably hear by now is a very productive feeling for me because my sense is that, you know, the current theories and explanations have no language for this kind of labor. My working theory for this is because for non-Western musicians who focus on live musical performance, we are stuck between two standards to either be authentic or to be original.

Anjeline: So either we're culturally authentic or we're fulfilling this romantic ideal of originality. And then if you don't fall within either value paradigm, then you're not really an artist. You're a musician, but you're like a working musician. And then there's a different kind of valuation to that. And you see it very clearly in the salaries that they get, the workplace treatment that they get.

Anjeline: And it's completely fused as well with their identity as migrant workers. I'm also a migration researcher. And what interested me about this form of music and this form of labor is that because of their emplacement in the leisure venue and because of the nature of their work as a kind of interactive service employment. We're looking here at the artistic labor of music performance as a kind of service. It's service work, which the migration literature will show you is completely institutionalized by the Philippine government, which sends off, you know, Filipino bodies as different kinds of workers, you know, care workers, service workers, and you hear it all over the marketing language, which naturalizes these kind of desirable workplace traits that, “we're good in English” – “we're very flexible.” The interesting thing with musicians is that the labor sector of musicians from the Philippines predated, you know, this whole labor sector of domestic workers and nurses by at least a hundred years. But even then, in that, if you look at the earlier research and the work of meLê yamomo, Fritz Schenker, lays this out really clearly, um, that musicians, Filipino musicians were racialized as being good mimics, flexible. They can do any kind of genre, any kind of language and perform it at the drop of a hat. The most important thing is that they're subservient and accommodating. There's a kind of racial awareness that we don't look white and we don't look black as one musician told me. So that's why we don't earn as much. And we won't take as much because we know that, you know, there's, it's primarily an economic driven choice for them to become musicians.

Emma: This is wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing about your research. Yeah. Um, as a final question, we could talk about your experience participating in the Decolonial Frequencies Festival, which was curated by meLê yamomo, uh, last year and the year before at Ballhaus Naunynstraße, and you participated in two of the performances invited by meLê, and, uh, you framed this relationship or meLê's curatorial initiative as a kind of listening. And could you talk about what that means to you? And what this experience was like?

Anjeline: Yeah, both experiences, both my research and my experience with Decolonial Frequencies was, is, is put together by the notion of listening as a politics and as a possibility and as labor. So what I learned from listening to these entertainers and clubs.

Anjeline: Is that, one, listening is a form of care, which can be instrumentalized. And the case of cover performance as entertainment, you know, we're so fixated with the imaginary of creative and musical labor as a kind of romantic ideal of self expression, of subjective self expression, that we forget this whole other aspect that, you know, singing is about singing for other people, which links very clearly back to my own personal experience of singing and my voice, that it's something that does something to people, does something for people.

Anjeline: It's very possible that you could be producing the same sound, physically, aesthetically, performing the same song. And then depending on the space, which I would understand as the material and the political, as well as the existential condition of listening, you know, of course, there's also time, but because I'm a geographer, I'm always going to lean heavily towards space.I'll have a debate with a historian next time.

Anjeline: Why do I say that? Well, one quick anecdote I'll share here is. One of my early field research experiences was listening to this opera singer who got a job as a gondolier in a casino resort in Macau, which again will remain unnamed but is pretty obvious. There was a fake canal in the resort and then it was the singer's job to ferry people and to sing to them.

Anjeline: So she was actually ferrying the gondola and then she was also singing, fulfilling this kind of fantasy ideal of a gondolier inside the casino. And she sang “O Sole Mio” for me. I went on her gondola ride. I paid for it. Got a little picture with her. And then, um, the person I was with who was an anthropologist based in Macau turned to me afterwards and she said, “I feel bad that she has to be singing this. In a mall, you know, she should be in an opera hall or something.”

Anjeline: So that very natural response made me pause because sure, she should be in an opera hall, but, but she's here, you know, and this is doing some kind of work too. So what is it about this implicit valuation we have and about where music belongs and how music is valued and how the space figure into that equation of that valuation.

Anjeline: So in my own work as a singer, it has always been this experimentation with different spaces. I always like to say that I'm doing the same thing everywhere. I'm improvising chants. I'm responding to the feedback that I get from the physical space of the venue, from the equipment that I work with, whether it's a looper. Or whether it's just the simple acoustics of the wall, because I'm singing acapella. Or whether it's with the collaborators that I'm playing with at that moment. In another sense, in a woo woo sense, I'm also responding to kind of psychic, or psychic feedback that I get from opening myself up to the energy of another person.

Anjeline: You know, some people will say, “yeah, tell me more about that.” And other people will be like, “that's very nice, dear.” All I'm saying is that when I sing for a certain person and I know that we have entered this kind of agreement that they will listen and that I will sing that I opened myself up to them.

Anjeline: In that moment, I use my voice really as an instrument to externalize or embody what I think I'm picking up from that person. And it can come as a, sometimes it's as clear as an image, sometimes it comes as words, and then sometimes it's as ephemeral as a color. And then I use my creative practice and my relationship with my voice to make something out of that.

Anjeline: So it's the same thing all over, but the spatial context changes everything. So, if it's a meditation space with people who are meditators and who have some experience with sound healing as a genre and as a modality, then I'm singing into their listening a certain way. If it's in an experimental art space, with people who don't give a fig about these things, but who are very into long durational, you know, non linear, non linear sonic experiences, then my music speaks to them too.

Anjeline: Having meLê, the wonderful thing about Decolonial Frequencies and meLê is, it's really one of the first, I would say the first experience I've had of a listening consciousness, and a listening space that was integrative. So I was invited to actively theorize what I was doing within this explicitly decolonial framing, which I've never had to do before because of my own kind of uncertainties about, “who's going to want to listen to this?”

Anjeline: And is this even decolonial? Because I'm not going back to this notion of cultural authenticity and the pressure of cultural authenticity. Um, that pressure is self-exerted, I would say. I feel a huge hesitation with representing myself as a Filipino, not from an indigenous tradition, not working with any clear lineage.

Anjeline: I'm just a middle class kid who grew up listening to MTV and popular music radio, like many other people, you know? So there's, um, “sorry guys, you know, you won't get that from me. You won't get anything exotic from me!”

Anjeline: And yet there's, there's kind of something, I don't know, uh, I read recently in an interview with John Berger when he was talking about the notion of the pre-verbal. So there is something numinous and pre-verbal about what I do that connects with people. And I know that because they come to me and they narrate their experience of listening. And then I'm just astounded because I'm hearing my own experience spoken back to me. So there is this kind of, uh, I would hedge against using the term universality, but there's certainly a mutuality, a reciprocity in the listening that comes out of this impulse of mine to sound the way that I do.

Anjeline: And I think meLê was one of the first people who not only welcomed, but challenged me to turn up the volume on that in a way.

Emma: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us today, Anjeline. I also want to thank Dr. Lala Zami, my colleague, and the initiator of this podcast, Stefani Gregor, and her team at Eufoniker.

Emma: And thank you for listening with us. Stay tuned for further sonic interventions.