Jarboe

Jarboe, the singer of the Swans, continued on Thirteen Masks (Sky, 1992) the druidic folk program she had started with Mike Gira on the band’s recent albums. The songs on this record confirm a tremendous talent. They are mostly solemn and quiet compositions, lyrical acrobatics between this world and the beyond, making her perhaps the greatest heir of Nico. The sound is sinister and ritualistic, fitting for a priestess.
But the album is far from uniform; it is almost a unique case of extreme contrasts, worthy of a psychoanalytic session. The dreamlike and fairy-tale atmosphere of Listen, hummed in a whisper and immersed in a cloud of oriental bells, is shattered by the industrial dance of Red, driven by funk cadences of seismic violence and sung with aggressive, filtered rap phrases, all spiced with heavy-metal machine-gun bursts à la Ministry and electronic hisses. A Man Of Hate begins like an expressionist opera lied, quickly introducing Middle Eastern modulations, obsessive keyboard chimes, and overlapping vocals, building an increasingly unreal atmosphere. It then plunges into the leaden and tumultuous The Believers, filled with dazzling ethno-electronic polyrhythms reminiscent of Gabriel and hysterically religious organ phrases.
From the delicate acoustic folk of The Lonely Voyeur, again whispered like a dream and surrounded by paradisiacal chords and reverbs, one moves to the vertiginous exotica of The Never Deserting Shadow, a thrilling ride through Arabic, Indian, Japanese, and Tibetan music. Moments of the highest class, like the swinging soul-jazz of Wooden Idols, sung as fervent gospel with sparse accompaniment, or Shotgun Road, where the vocals float freely over layers of dissonance and noise, alternate with moments of psychotic delirium, such as I Got A Gun, again cut through by booming “industrial” cadences.
Jarboe’s ability to declaim and narrate her moral parables is always spectacular, whether she uses only voice and guitar, as in A Man Of Hate, or indulges in rap and electronics, as in Freedom. Her voice is almost always layered with echoes, choirs, and contrapuntal self-harmonies; the guitars and other instruments are often mixed in a sophisticated manner, and many tracks feature a small ensemble (really small, one or two people) assisting her—but essentially, it is Jarboe alone in a room speaking to the world. The means are always minimal, but the effects are explosive, as demonstrated by the final track, Cries, in which Jarboe unleashes all her tricks.
Altogether, it constitutes an intensely magical work. It is not only her skill in “orchestration,” fusing acoustic, electronic, and overdubbed sounds, or the audacity of experimenting with song form, incorporating contrasting genres and sonorities, but her multifaceted recitation, her seemingly monotone yet highly expressive register—capable of ranging from operatic mezzo-soprano to a lullaby—ingeniously employing recording tricks, that makes the difference. The chameleonic rhythmic transformations of these tracks are merely an extension of this practice. Fifteen masterpieces.

In 1993, Jarboe also took on the Beautiful People Ltd project, in collaboration with Lary Seven. The eponymous album (for Sub Rosa) shines with a suave arrangement and surreal melodies, and above all with an infinitely lighter touch, like a fairy rather than a nightmare. It is indeed the most pop album of her career, the most carefree.

Sacrificial Cake (Alternative Tentacles, 1995) delivers another vocal tour de force worthy of the greatest experimental performers.
Each song is practically a different voice, and the album is a grotesque convocation: from the sweet register of Lavender Girl to the Japanese chant of Troll Lullaby, Jarboe performs a breathtaking series of supernatural metamorphoses. She reaches metaphysical heights with the ethereal scat of Spiral Staircase, probes hedonistic instincts in free vocalizations over ethno-electronic rhythms on Ode To V, delves into the depths of existential fear with the stammering of Not Logical, confronts hallucinatory mental states with psychotic recitation in a whirlwind of vocal sampling on Surgical Saviour.
At the same time macabre and sensual, her performance shows no modesty and grants no respite. Jarboe departs with a long finale of grimaces, animal cries, guttural witch voices, lysergic dilations, and demonic moans (Troll), rivaling Meredith Monk and Joan LaBarbara. Jarboe also reserves surprises, such as when she meows bawdily and boldly in rap over the quirky rhythm of Yum-Yab, or snarls sarcastically at aspiring stars in the garage-soul rock of Deflowered. Fundamentally, however, she has enough charisma to leave even the most perverse punk breathless. In certain moments (Shimmer), it truly seems possible to hear how Nico would sing if she were still alive today.
A mention is also due to her electronic backdrops, which are equally nightmarish and would shine in an anthology of avant-garde music.

Anhedoniac (Young God, 1998) is instead an album of recitations more than of music. Jarboe gathers her inner voices and, using these voices (more spoken than sung), constructs a strongly unified and thematic work. This time Jarboe leans toward the esoteric dramaturgy of Diamanda Galas, rather than the ancestral fairy tales of Nico. The witches’ convocation of Anhedoniac (Arabian organ lullaby, martial drums), the subconscious voices of The Cage (electronic buzzing), and the evil spirit of Forever (metallurgic cadence) make use of evocative scenarios, but Jarboe’s singing abilities are limited, as are her arranging skills. Some songs present her as the innocent child, but the bulk of the album consists of recitations.

For her spiritual contritions bordering on pure madness, Jarboe has taken Nico’s place in the hearts of many melancholy enthusiasts.

Too much of Disburden Disciple (2000) is spoken, not sung, and the arrangements are truly minimal. The feeling of trance gets sometimes tedious, but certainly she can muster impressive magnetism both in the witchy a-cappella hymn The Seance and in the nine-minute shamanic tribal ritual Pure War. The piano lied Under actually evokes an expressionist cabaret of the 1920s.

Dissected (Living, 2003) is an album of other artists remixing her music.

The Men Album (2005), six years in the works, contains a disc of mediocre folk-rock ballads and a disc of embarrassing dance tracks.

Love (2006) was a collaboration with poet• Cedric Victr and her second venture into "spoken-word" after The Conduit (2006), a collaboration with poet Joshua Fraser and guitarist Nic LeBan. She didn't write the texts of these albums, she recited them (and occasionally sung them).

She suddenly became hyper-prolific. Viscera (2007) was a collaboration with Byla, i.a. Kevin Hufnagel (guitar) and Colin Marston (guitar) of Dysrhythmia, consisting in three lengthy suites of dark ambient and two shorter pieces. J2 (The End, 2008) was a collaboration between Jarboe and Godflesh's Justin Broadrick devoted to ambient electronic songs.

Mahakali (2008) offers a mix of metal, ambient, folk and noise, with peaks of gothic pathos in the infernal panorama of The House of Void and in the cinematic and bombastic Transmogrification. She proves to be a valid pupil of Diamanda Galas in A Sea of Blood and Hollow Screaming Dark Consort (2008), originally sold as an ambient companion to Mahakali, was her second collaboration with• Cedric Victo.

The three volumes of Stream Enterer (2008) were spoken-word collaborations with LeBan (here disguised under the moniker Baleyyg).

The mostly instrumental Durga (2009), Ugra (2009) and Daksinakali (2009) continued to explore her gothic underworld but this time from the perspective of the Hindu goddess Kali.

Trying to transpose in music the breathing exercises of Buddhist Tonglen meditation, she crafted the serene pieces of Skullgirl (2009), notably the symphonic Tonglen. That was the blueprint for Alchemic (2009), on which she explored a variety of soundscapes, from the threnody of Alchemic 3 to the ambient jazz ballad of Alchemic 5, but all inspired by Buddhist meditation, with a peak of romantic Zen trance in the symphonic chant Alchemic 1.

Primal Baroque Experiment (2010) contains more traditional rock songs, notably the propulsive Racing to Our Death. J3N (2010) was another collaboration with• Baleyy.

Indemnity (2011) and Indemnity 2 (2012) consist of reinterpretation of songs by Swans and World Of Skin.

Dreams (2013) is a collection of atmospheric songs, notably The Drink. Mystagogue (2013) is a two-hour double-album that contains music by her and others (the Sweet Meat Love & Holy Cult). Zen J Jazz (2015) was her blues-jazz album on which she played all the instruments. Sun Falling (2015), a collaboration with Veil of Thorns, contains the 20-minute doom-drone cosmic fantasia Dust Storm. The four-disc box-set Artbox (2017) contains a live set recorded in 2009, an expanded version of My Delicate Beast, a 12-song album of new material titled As Mind Dissolves As Song Begins, a 4-song mini-album titled Space Prose, and artwork made by her. The Cut of the Warrior (2018), inspired by Tibetan Buddhism and with electronic arrangements by Byla, contains the harrowing scream of Wayfaring Stranger in the Bardo. Illusory (2020) contains more regular songs like the a-cappella church hymn Cathedral and the pagan folk lullaby Man of Hate. She was still a master of suspense, as shown in ghastly expressionist pieces like The Wanderer Returns and The Wanderer Hallowed on A Tulpa (2020), her best album in a while. Skin, Blood, Women, Roses (2022) is simply a reissue of the Skin's classic.