A spellbinding storybook of dreams and nightmares – Jarboe

The whole visualisation just came to me, and I was completely inspired. I could see it vividly, you know. And then you counter that with of course, the whole ‘Troll’ series. That was inspired for something that I saw as a kid. I made the mistake of taking some LSD in my bedroom, and I saw this thing appear at the doorway, bow its head because it was too tall to get in the doorway, and come inside, and it was this troll. And so, I wrote this piece based on that experience, right?

A lot of the pieces on Sacrificial Cake are related to those experiences that I had when I was a teen and experimenting with things and, and then my love – which I still have – for the art and visuals of Morocco. I’ve always been attracted to that. That’s what the track Shimmer is referencing. And Deflowered is absolutely about women in music at that time, what’s expected from you to make it in music and the price that you’ll pay, you know. The reference is for the informed to understand the metaphor

‘Make all the critics cream
Just get down on your knees
Learn how to scream and seize
Every “opportunity”
You’ll make them beg for it
You’re one tough rockin’ bitch
You got a lot to show
On college radio’

I mean, what is she doing there? Yeah, she’s doing that! So, it’s talking about you’ve got to go that far to sell yourself and make your way up. And so Deflowered is my giving the finger to the music business.

Giles

Your lyrics, and the way you deliver them are full of expression – humour, trauma, fantasy and as we heard with a double meaning – and then something like the totally hypnotic Not Logical, alternating between sung and whispered. Can you tell us a bit more about how you have experimented with, or learned from, language and delivery?

Jarboe

Well, I’ve researched the use of antiquated expressions and words throughout literature, and odd turns of phrase, that kind of thing, like, Ode to V (track on Sacrificial Cake) are words that are either reference to female orgasm or the vagina. I also did it with Red (track on 1991’s Thirteen Masks), which, Jim Thirlwell produced, and this ‘red’ is about the different meanings and interpretations of that powerful attention-getting colour. So, I researched all the tongue in cheek and humourous turns of phrase for the word ‘red’. That was a deliberate exploration into words and language, then saying them as fast as I could, making them kind of rhyme and jokey kind of phrases. That was a fun experiment. 

‘red as china, rubies, leather bridles, stirrups, sticky gooey syrup,
red as caviar, mars, red hell, red stripe, life,
red as Jack the Ripper’s surgical knife’

My major in school was English literature, and I always did really well with that and grammar and English at school. All the teachers thought I was going to be a writer and really pushed me to read. Oh, gosh, I was reading James Joyce, Henry James, and all kinds of stuff. I remember when my mother picked up some of the books the teachers were giving me as extra-curricular reading, she was horrified. She thought it was inappropriate. But, it was very appropriate, you know, because then I moved on to Ingmar Bergman films and Herman Hesse, all kinds of incredible books and literature as a kid and as a teenager. I’m so grateful for all these writers because they expand your brain. I love getting into some good fiction. I feel an intimate connection, like I can enter that world and just really be lost in it. I would encourage anyone to do this. I do have a digital reader, but I prefer physical books – I love holding them and turning the physical page. It’s like I have a relationship with it, but I think I only felt this way after I actually got rid of my entire book collection (as well as my entire vinyl collection). So I had, gosh, I’m not exaggerating, two full walls floor to ceiling of bookshelves – thousands of books. I went through this phase of purging every single thing I owned. I donated every single one of my books to Books For A Better World. And so now I’ve started over the past couple of years longing for books again – it’s an addiction I can’t shake {laughs}. So, I’ve actually re-bought some of the books I’ve donated but some of them are first editions that you can’t buy anymore because they’re now collector’s items. But I purged everything I owned. I got down to nothing at all. I’m talking furniture, clothes, many things gathered from tours, all kinds of wonderful things. All donated. I had to get to that place where I could carefully curate a fresh start and also to see what it was like to have less. So now if I buy something new, I get rid of something else, so I don’t become a hoarder or feel burdened by material things. 

Giles

This is relevant to the language and meaning topic, but you’ve consistently performed with this unique ability to create hugely conflicting feelings within your music either within tracks themselves or the whole album – dream versus reality, familiar versus unfamiliar, paradise versus purgatory, angelic versus demonic, humour and discomfort. For me, personally, I can trace that back to In My Garden on Children of God (Swans’ 1987 album). 

Jarboe

As to my sense of humour, the rap version of Come Out on skin is that sense of humour deliberately coming through. The whole concept of the skin collection of songs was expressed in the title. Of course, there are different perspectives of roses, and they take on a different significance on their own and they have a different side in the relationship between roses, blood and the menstrual cycle. The whole concept of the skin, which I touched on in the rap, you know, was that skin was referring to an adult, you know, device {laughs} And I’m absolutely not an advocate of guns {laughs}, so I think my audience understood that that was a metaphor. It’s always been a metaphor when I’ve used that word. I think that it was successful in that it definitely explores the different sides of sexuality and oneness, you know, as it were. I listened to it again, obviously, when we were doing the remastering with the wonderful engineers of Consouling Sounds and it’s really impressive. The full string section on 1000 Years, that’s not something anyone does these days. It was quite perverse humour in a way to have the Come Out song back to back with Man I Love  {laughs}  – the vocal is deliberately coy and breathy, you know, almost a Marilyn Monroe kind of breathy. A coy play, I guess is what I’d say. I always assume that there is intelligence and sensitivity in the audience for that. 

Anyway, I’m thrilled that Sacrificial Cake is coming out on vinyl (in beautiful lavender vinyl and packaging in homage to the track Lavender Girl) and I’m thrilled that skin blood woman roses is already out on vinyl. They’re both beautiful and I’m grateful to everyone involved. 

Giles

Turning to the music you’ve produced in more recent years; I really think that Illusory is also up there as one of your best along with Sacrificial Cake and skin. It’s another fabulous piece…

Jarboe

Oh, thank you, I have to say, that’s my heart when I play that album – I really gave it everything I had. I worked on it laboriously. Every detail is important to me to the point of making things you know, at times quite raw. For the version of Man of Hate on that album, my voice is quite raw and without effects to really make it sound plaintive. I also bring in a trademark of mine, which I hope people see, but perhaps some people don’t, which is this black humour. I have a very powerful sense of humour in my work – not a ‘hahaha’ sense of humour and ironic is not the word either – it’s dark…kind of a nod. I sing in this little angelic voice through the song – ‘love, love, love, true love’ – and then towards the end, right when I’m about to say ‘true love’, there’s the sound of a guillotine and a head being chopped off, and then there’s applause. It’s brutal. The sound I left at the end – the drone – that’s a nod to when I was in Swans when I would tape down a key on the keyboard, and we’d walk off the stage, and you would just hear that drone. So, that was a nod to performance as well as to, well, the world. At the time, I was thinking of a particular leader in this country and what a perfect time it was to do this and to perform it live. But now, with the way things have changed, with the situation between Ukraine and Russia, I cannot in good faith perform that right now. I don’t want to bring it down any darker than it already is. So, I’m going to be approaching the set in a different way, revisiting what I did for NecronomiCon, which is the Literary Festival in Providence, Rhode Island. I’m also going to be performing on a MacBook Pro, in addition to the vocals, and then working with Peter Emerson Williams, the guitarist, doing electric guitar with loops and drones. I was going to do the keyboards again, like on the 2020 tour, and then I thought, actually I can get all those sounds and be much better if I simply do them with a controller keyboard and access the computer. And that’s quite a challenge – I’m still learning. But I want people to be relaxed and give it more of a meditative experience. I don’t want to go into any place that’s going to be too obviously dark given where we are – that’s the last thing I want to bring live.

Giles

What have you learned about yourself and what drives you to create your art?

Jarboe

For me, my art is just intuitive based. I don’t have a strategy or a plan other than listening to the inner voice and trying to respect my relationship with myself. I don’t have any outside influences. I’ve always been reclusive and a loner – I have just a very few close friends. My mind is always working on some ideas and creativity. It doesn’t have to be music; it could be anything at all. And so, I’m very happy because I know how to keep myself entertained, happy and busy without needing anyone at all. My childhood was almost like being an only child as my brothers were a lot older. I’m sometimes hard to get to know and I’m a kind of an aloof, distant person. Of course, this can work to your disadvantage if you go into the music business. But I don’t really want anything to do with the music business, I consider myself a musician and artist who is using music, but I never really aspire to anything other than having an idea and fulfilling that idea. Before I was in Swans, I was doing electronic, highly experimental work and that whole realm was more appropriate for an art gallery and for audio installations, which I did. When I discovered music that was different, you know, it was challenging initially and then different – like SPK and Cabaret Voltaire  – and one of them I heard on this show was Swans and so with Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten there was something about both of those groups that spoke to me.  I went to New York to interview and meet Swans for a little art zine that I had. And then I loved the neighbourhood and those days and the artists that I met, you know, like Lydia Lunch and Jim Thirlwell. It was a really interesting neighbourhood; it was quite funky. And of course, it’s not anymore, but it had a very, you know, DIY vibe to it. It was just culturally very inviting. It was like, this little niche, maybe like Berlin was in the 80s before the Wall came down, you know, a small enclave of artists. I think that’s what propelled me to come up there to be part of it. But again, it was like beating your head against the wall for years and years and years because there was no compromise, there was no-one sounding like us, no-one doing what we were doing. When Michael introduced the acoustic guitar and these ballads, and when the door was opened to my training in music (I had training in playing the organ, singing and in choirs) and all my musical input, the entire direction of the band began to change, you know. We went through all these phases, culminating in something as radical as Love Will Tear Us Apart. So suddenly, we were doing some crazy eclecticism from I Crawled to Love Will Tear Us Apart. But we still had this like interior isolation, you know, like we didn’t hang out, we weren’t making the scene or working the room. That’s the opposite of us and that fits my personality because I don’t do that stuff, either.

Giles

I’m an introvert and can empathise with the ‘working the room’ situations. Growing up, I definitely felt a pressure from my parents to conform to their ideas of what a “career’ should look like, to play classical music and to conform to their ideas of what constituted “good music” – either playing or listening. I ended up bothering about what other people thought of me up until about 5 years ago. 

Jarboe

I would definitely say I’m an introvert as well. I certainly was growing up and I also had the same pressure from my father, who was very talented musically as a hobby. When I was a toddler, he had me singing here singing there, just noticing that note, to see if I was tone deaf or if I could carry a tune. And when he saw that I could carry a tune, he pushed the music and so he paid for all these lessons. He pushed me into choirs and all this stuff like voice lessons. And I also went into the rebellious phase where I embraced the hardcore scene, so I can relate to what you’re saying with the pressure to take these lessons. I was constantly being trotted out when guests would come over to sit at and play the organ for them. I was entertainment for the guests. And I hated that. I’m sure that there was no intention of anything negative, it just made you feel like you had to deliver. Also, the lessons were very rigorous and unbending. I started to play songs in the way I interpret them from a very young age, but the teacher would say, ‘No, no’, blah, blah, blah. That carried over into the voice lessons where I was told ‘this is improper singing; you have to get rid of all the breath’. And I hated that. And then there was this argument of, well, pop music and rock music are not true singing. I disagreed obviously. So, to go from pressuring you to sing Gilbert and Sullivan to wanting to sing like any of the bands that were especially coming out of England at the time. Those were the bands that were inspiring me. So, I realized that I could never fulfil what my father wanted me to be. I don’t think he was ever happy with me. I think he was disappointed in me. 

Giles

How did that make you feel?

Jarboe

I realised that the path that he started me on and encouraged me to follow was on his terms. He died before I joined Swans, so he never heard anything that I produced professionally. I’m sure he would have been horrified at the direction that I went into. I think that my mother was a little more open. She actually met Michael and heard some other recordings that I made. She knew how much it meant to me, so was supportive for that reason. But he wouldn’t have been supportive at all. I think he would have been absolutely aghast. Yes.

Giles

Have you ever felt a distance in the relationship between you and the audience?

Jarboe

I was aware of this censorial nature of Michael which is that he would always want an element of restraint, but not necessarily for himself: if you look at the early Swans tours where he was in his underwear and exposing his butt to the audience, that was extremely physically visceral performance and theatrical to me. And yet, I wasn’t allowed to do that. I had to maintain a certain, I guess you would say, removal and distance from the theatre. I could only take it so far and I had to stop. And it was the same with that particular performance. I then had to compose myself and go back to being a member of the band at the keyboards. I kind of understand that mindset, because, you know, taking it over the edge might or might not be successful. A lot of rock musicians have gone over the edge: Iggy Pop, early in his career, was climbing on broken glass; and I already mentioned what Michael was doing. 

Giles

How did you react to this censorship when you went solo?

Jarboe

I mean, a number of my songs have visceral lyrics: at a show in 2004, I did Centre, which is about a prostitute in in the red light district in Amsterdam getting strangled by a serial killer. In that performance, I was in the middle of the audience on the floor, and I took the microphone cord, wrapped it around my throat, and I was choking myself. So, in that performance, that’s me on my own with no one holding me back. I can go that far into illustrating visceral lyrics. But I decided to stop doing that after the 2012 tour, and the reason was this: I liked this idea of getting off the stage and doing the show from the audience, and it was working up to a certain point, but I realised that I was scaring people. I’d look at their faces and they were afraid of me. Then, there was a show I did in Prague, I think. I was doing this thing at the very end where I‘d have my head low, go up to people and look into their eyes to see if they were frightened or not. And you could see the smile on their face, like they were not afraid. So, then I would open my arms, and we would hug each other, right? It was like this waltz at the end of the set where we were openly hugging. Anyway, I went to the back of the room, and there’s a guy and I looked at him and I couldn’t read his face, he seemed kind of neutral. And he was at the very end of the room. And so, I went ahead and I tried to see if it was okay, because his face was kind of blank. And I could feel him – I guess the word I would use is trembling, like in anger. I could just feel his energy was not right, it felt like anger energy. So, I pulled back as gracefully as I could and turned my head and I got out of there. At the end of that, we discussed it and decided that I was doing a potentially extremely dangerous thing. Because you don’t know who’s out there and what experiences they are bringing to the show. Maybe the stage is more of a safety net than it is a barrier between the audience and the performer. You know what I mean? I didn’t really think about that until that experience, isn’t that incredible? I really should have thought about that, because certainly in the early years of Swans, I had audience members that just spat at me, kicked and slapped me. And these are just fans that don’t understand, they think it’s punk or something. So, now I do have a “barrier”. And, of course, COVID is going to help that a lot because I can’t go out and hug and greet you anymore, you know what I mean? I think that now maybe it’s not so good to be too approachable for the show.

Giles

That treatment from some members of Swans’ audience is appalling. Have you sensed a discernible change in the industry for women?

Jarboe

Well, there’s definitely been a huge effort, I would say, by women artists and the publicity machine to give you that impression. And I’m sure that, especially now, \ that things are better. But at the same time, since I started with the women’s movement, one of the things that’s happened is this idea of taking back language, words and images that were originally meant to insult women. The language and flagrant expressions of physicality and sexuality can be interpreted in different ways. In talking about the high tier of the music business, I mean, it couldn’t be more porno. This is something that continues; you’re expected to be absolutely perfect physically and showing everything that you got. Some women think that’s powerful, but some women may think that’s maybe not necessary. It’s still a mixed bag for me.

Giles

If we could talk a little bit about your live performance of I Crawled on the “final” Swans tour of ’97 because it is one of the most visceral, terrifying and compelling live performances I’ve seen. Watching you bring the characters to life on the film (Marco Porsia’s 2019 documentary about Swans, ‘Where Does A Body End?’), well, it’s jaw dropping.

Jarboe

I’ve talked about this before but, when I went to see the Swans reformation, they did a version of that song, and I was just horrified. I mean, I hated it. And I went back afterwards, and they asked me what I thought of it. And I came right out and said, ‘Well, I mean, what you’ve done with that – with the beat, I mean, it’s almost like you’re doing a dance or disco version of that song, and I can’t abide by that. I said my interpretation, in my opinion, was superior, and I can stand by that’. And then it became apparent that someone in the band wasn’t aware of my interpretation. Unbelievable. I was kind of surprised at that. Then Michael said, ‘Oh, well, we did that on, you know, the (“final”) tour. And she did the performance of it’. And then he said it was gut wrenching. And so, I think to answer you, yes, it was gut wrenching. I think that’s a good way to describe it. And, when you realise that visually, what is being portrayed there was a theatrical performance, even though I physically may have been quite restrained – you know, I wasn’t flailing about – I think that it was a theatrical in terms of the changes of the characters that sang, in terms of the characters that come forward. And when you come on board with me, and you see how I’m interpreting it, and what is happening to her, it’s pretty horrific. Remember all this was performance based – the breathiness, the intro, the sing songy interlude in there where she’s just lost and getting ready to be attacked – there were no effects, no machines being operated to bring out those different characters. And she’s just like, a little girl, and then, you know, the demon, the monster comes along and is riding her and so then, at the end, I went into the sub voice and it freaked people out that I could do that and that I could do it every damn night. 

I think that in my mind, live, I was visualising what was happening. 

I’m sure there was a time factor involved, but I think there could have been some sort of a pause at the end of I Crawled – a drone or silence, perhaps – so we could all, like, focus on how horrific that was, you know, before moving on to the next song. Whereas, as you know, in the set, it was literally walk back to the keyboards and start playing. I’m not saying it should have been a reverential silence, but…

Giles

I‘m trying to think how to describe your facial expression and body movement when you turn around to walk back to your keyboards….

Jarboe

Drained {laughs}

Giles

It feels like applause from the audience isn’t appropriate for something as monumental as this..

Jarboe

Yeah, that was weird. And, you know, it’s not that easy to do it. I could just do an entire interview just on that one song, but I won’t do that {laughs}. But, when I talk about this restraint – this not giving the audience what they want – that is a 100% objective of working with Michael. So, for example, we’d never do the songs off the album that has just come out. And then take, for example, I Crawled: I’m out there alone, the band’s behind me and I’m giving a climax and drama with my vocal performance. And yet the band does not respond. So, I keep on doing something and in this case, it was it was the squealing you know, ‘make it right, make it right’. I’d go way up high and I’d do it over and over and so naturally, you know, I’m waiting for the bass and the drums to kick in and to move it forward. Well, you know, it never happened! {laughs}. So basically, I’m hanging out there alone, where there’s the sea and you’re on the plank. And you’re alone! This was the other issue: I never knew night to night when the group was going to respond to me because they were under the direction of Michael. He would hold them back – wait, wait, wait. I would never have any clue about when to do my climactic squeal {laughs} because I never knew when the band was going to respond. That was just the way it was.

Jarboe’s UK and European tour starts on 8 November at Café Oto, London

www.thelivingjarboe.com

Sacrificial Cake is released on 18 November 2022

Label: The Circle Music www.circlemusic.gr

Music Format: 2 LP, Tip On Sleeve Hardboard Gatefold Jacket, 180 lavender vinyl, limited to 500

Photo Credit – Marilyn Chen