Well-Done Wordless Vocals

The Bush Oysters "Egg Hole"

Alison Goldfrapp - All of her work with Orbital, see especially "Are We Here?" and "Sad But True"

I'm going to hijack the thread cos I got a QUESTION!

Do you listen to songs with wordless vocals and songs with vocals that you know are words but that you don't understand (cos you don't know the language?) differently?

yes, it's like listening to foreign language music when you don't speak that language ie, Yiddish folk music, J-pop, assorted opera, 1960s Parisian pop... actually French and German music, as someone who only knows only the vaguest kind of things about those languages i can attest that they work in a slightly different way because although the words have a sense of familiarity about them. you may not comprehend fully the gist of the piece but the bits you do hear correctly (or that you *think* you hear correctly..) sort of snag in your mind. it's like mishearing the words to a pop song and inadvertently coming up with something completely different (and occassionally better) to what the original artist had in mind.

this kind of lack of comprehension in the vocal cues the imagination to a world of other possibilities.

there was an interview on pennyblackmusic.com with Alexander Bailey from the Radio Khartoum label which suggested something similar, i think.

and i've managed to get through all of that without mentioning Gary Numan's Dance once.

COCK! TOE! TWINS! neu! - "lila engel"! the whole damn "miracles" album by yma sumac.

Do you listen to songs with wordless vocals and songs with vocals that you know are words but that you don't understand (cos you don't know the language?) differently?

Tom, to give a boringly general answer, first: it depends on how closely the wordless vocals attempt to mimic a sound pattern which might plausibly occur in a human language. In the examples I gave, the vocals at the beginning of "Somewhere In Space" (performed by Art Jenkins, I have been told) consist mostly of a sort of trilling sound. The sounds he is singing don't really sound to me like they could possibly be the sounds of a real human language. The vocals in the Liquid Liquid song have always sounded close to be garbled words in a real language. They have more of a glossolalia feel to them than the vocals in "Somewhere In Space" which are more like a type of humming (except they aren't humming). The vocals in the Cocteau Twins and Magma both sound to me to be fairly close to something that could be a real language. (I'm not particularly fans of either one, incidentally, though they have some okay moments.)

Maybe because I have listened to so much Arabic music, I can, to some extent, hear the sounds of the words fairly distinctly. Also, classical Arabic singers put a high premium on careful pronunciation (probably derived from the importance placed on this in Qur'anic recitation), which I think makes it easier to hear that it is really a language, if that makes sense. I also remember listening to Israeli songs and being struck by some odd, and to my ears pleasing, vowel combinations that occur frequently in Hebrew: ahs next to long "o"s. For instance "Hagvaot Hakulot," which I get a charge out of simply saying. (Hahgvah-oat Hahku-loat.) I would say that with songs sung in real languages, it is possible for me to sort of analyze it into phrases, to hear a pause in a line as a pause in a sentence, even though I can't understand the language. But it may be possible to create an artificial language that sounds natural enough that I would hear it as such. (I think that could make an interesting experiment, actually. Play some examples for people and then have them decide if what they heard was in a natural language.) Spanish is a little different, since I already know a tiny bit of it, and its phonemic pattern is familiar enough that I can often sing along, even if I don't know what I'm singing.

I'm not sure where people like Joan La Barbara and Meredith Monk, who I used to listen to a lot more than I do now, would fit in, but I think Joan La Barbara generally goes for sounds that don't seem language like. Some of Meredith Monk's music seems to make more an effort to mimic language sounds. (I'm thinking particularly, I think, of "Doleman Music.")

I have a feeling I haven't really answered your question, since I am slipping in a relatively "objective" description of how these different things sound, rather than how I listen to them.

I just read Wyndham Earl's response and I see it's closer to mine than it looked like at first glance.

There's so much to hear in a singer like Oum Kalthoum, even if you can't understand the words. The way she will sort of "wind up" a certain phrase and then throw it out. Of course, you also miss something by not knowing the language, but I sometimes wonder if you can hear certain things better. (I bet certain English language songs I don't quite like because I can't get past the lyrics, for one reason or another, would sound great if I couldn't understand them.)

i think a good recent example (obviously not wordless but bear with me) is Lynch/Badalamenti's Spanish version of Crying as featured in Mulholland Drive. how beautiful is that? i can't speak a word of Spanish and after hearing that song i don't ever want to. i want to believe the words have been encoded from satellite transmissions and not necessarily taken from a rather naff junk pop song.

certain languages have a certain aesthetic quality all of their own. Scandivian i always loved because of its harsh syllabic cadences which are almost percussive. icelandic is beautiful because it sounds like a communique from another planet.

i did write an essay about this under a different name somewhere on the internet last year.

i like the idea of voice as instrument. i prefer the more intangible qualities of these approaches to simple reams of prose and bad poetry. it occurs to an extent in the most commercial kind of pop music where words may be used to fire off certain images or add a sort of counterpoint to the music. this works better in something like Destinys Child's Bootylicious than it does in something like Oasis's Cast No Shadow. Oasis are obsessed with 'real' lyrics and their inarticularcy leads to stumbling, dreary lyrical prose constructed with cliche building blocks. Destiny's Child make a song about arse sound incredible because their vocal just detonates on top of the music and even if you don't understand what they're singing or really give a toss (i can recite about half a line from the entire song excluding the refrain) the way words are used in that song is similar to say, (argh, horrible term coming up) 'abstract hip hop', where vocals are used in an almost percussive sense.

returning to the Crying thing, Lynch also did an interesting album called Lux Vivens with an opera singer named Jocelyn Montgomery. very minimalist with very little in the way of actual 'music' to speak of and no English lyrics (if they are lyrics at all...) i think it's sort of a good indication of how unintelligable and/or non- literary/lyrical music can carry enormous emotional weight.

i would mention Mike Patton's Adult Themes For Voice but that's perhaps something different, no words or lyrics but the titles act as a sort of explanation, like the piece of card next to a piece of semi- abstract art in a gallery telling you that its a picture of a woman cutting cheese, something which you wouldn't have recognised had it not been for the title. still, that's quite fun and, y'know, wordless vocal and all that...

Combustible Edison "Dior"
Stereolab "Golden Atoms"
Swingle Singers (duh)
Ennio Morricone
Jerry Goldsmith "Illustrated Man" Soundtrack

"London is drowning -- and I -- I live by the river
OOAHH . . . .AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH . . . OOAH AH-AH-AH-AH-AH!!!!!!"

With death metal, it doesn't really matter one way or another. I can't think of too much other vocal music without actual words. But lyrics in spanish always sound better. Shitty hardcore punk in random eastern euro languages too.

Much of Bjork's "Modern Things"... unless my suspicion is correct and she really *is* singing about Chairman Mao.

Quite often I block out the significance of words even when I know what they mean. I listen to music with lyrics I can understand but I'm listening to the music, as it were, as opposed to the words.

Lots of stuff by Clinic - there's a lot of wordless click-y inflection that sounds like a whole other rhythm within the song. It adds another dimension to the music that more than makes up for the tres-murky to non-existent lyrical subj. matter, and it alters the way you dance.....like that time I was 14, very depressed, alone at home and dancing drunk to Pizzaman, and I suddenly became *desperately* horny, and I decided to stick an oiled up AA battery up my bum and get off by continuing dancing and sloshing the battery around in there.....actually, I danced pretty much the same way I always did....until the battery popped out that is....should have just gone with pilfering one of my sister's tampons as usual....so much for vietnam.....

DoRayMe and Wyndam Earl - ace answers, thanks, much more interesting than I expected when I asked the qn!

Keiji Haino
MASONNA

not really wordless but complete nonsense nonetheless - All most heaen by Rian Murphy and Will Oldham. Lovely arrangements by Jim O'Rourke. day boge in dey bo.

many a 4AD label band from the 80s have wordless lyrics

song of siren this mortal coil?

Keiji haino in his duo with derek bailey 'Songs'.

Diamanda galas on 'Schrei X' album.

Eye's work with the Boredoms comes to mind, as does Yoshida's singing with the Ruins. Yoshida is a big Magma fan, so an obvious connection there. When I first heard the Boredoms, I thought the singing was in Japanese. Only later did I learn that it was nonsense syllables. I found this reassuring, because I no longer felt like I was missing out on an important dimension of the music by not being able to speak Japanese - though, thinking about it a bit further, perhaps the particular syllable combinations are more evocative to Japanese speakers. Another artist who mines the fertile zone between language and nonsense vocalization is Jaap Blonk. It helps of course that he's Dutch and so is naturally fluent in something like a zillion languages. This enables him to pull off "Finnegan's Wake"-style language stews.

song of siren this mortal coil?

Except that has lyrics, and for early Liz Fraser vocals, they're quite understandable (admittedly being written by Tim Buckley might have helped).

Tonight I saw Art Jenkins, the guy who does the vocals on "Somewhere In Space," performing with the Arkestra. He's been sick, so I'm glad his back on his feet again. Good show.

Milton Nascimento, "Lilia", "Clube da Esquina No. 2", etc.

Just got back from Brian Wilson's show at the Royal Festival Hall, so obvious answer is Our Prayer. The best sound I've ever heard coming from a live performance. Utterly breathtaking.

Has anyone else on this board been attending these shows? Aren't they simply life-affirming?

Is he not working with bad studio musicians, then?

Saw Brian Friday night in Glasgow and it was amazing. The band are stunning and nailed the 7 part harmonies. The version of Heroes and Villains was the best performance of the evening although I thought all the early songs pre-66 sounded great too without it feeling like an oldies revival show. They played them with such spirit that they came off really fresh and there was the extra dimension of someone of Wilsons age singing the songs that he wrote when he was 19/20.

Brians singing was a bit off at the start and I thought it was going to be a really tragic evening but he found himself part way through the first set and sang pretty well thereafter esp. during Pet Sounds. Thought the hand movements during the songs were a bit strange although I got used to it. It was also obvious how the band were there to support him and how much of a buzz they got out of it.

He's still obviously damaged though, with all his "ad-libs" and song introductions being exactly the same at every gig and he never played his piano once.

Still it *was* Brian Wilson and it was a beautiful experience. Could have done without the mentalists shouting 'genius' at every opportunity though.

try this one,

sucre3 by monstre http://www.alien8recordings.com/sucre3.php3

alone and sad in the human universe i liked d.byrne's "the forest"