MMOONN

involved with its voodoo subculture so deeply that she wrote a book and made a film about it, Divine Horsemen. Have you ever begun studying one Art form, but, like her, found yourself more intrigued by another? ODEYI NINI: Not in a specific way. But of course, I’ ve definitely sought out parts of the world where I could share my work and also experience something else. And one of the places I traveled to was Mongolia, where I met with a combination of contemporary musicians and traditional musicians, and for two weeks,

and sharing my work in places like that, and just experiencing nature, the spiritual aspect involved, and recognizing that energy and the connection between my voice and nature, and in the Mongolian tradition, as well.

IE: What is that connection? Because you seem to love performing as much in forest glades as you do in echoey museums. ON: Well, it’ s about resonance, basically. I was in a tunnel up in a forest, high up in the mountains, and it was just an incredible place. It was

through a performance series in L. A., and they had me perform in there, and people just stood along the edge of the tunnel. And it was the first performance I did, post-pandemic, so I hadn’ t sung for a year and a half, and it was very beautiful. But I think that there are a lot of places like that that just have natural acoustics. And before that, I thought I had left the microphone, and that I would never go back to it. Because my voice as a solo artist— and what I’ d been developing for a very long time, like 15 years here in Los Angeles, as an interdisciplinary solo vocal artist, just working with the acoustics of a space— was sound explored dynamically, and playing with sound, literally, and expression in my body, and all the other musical elements that come in. But the space and the acoustics and the resonance and the energy is essential to it. And I don’ t use words very much— they affect me

sometimes when they come in, so I’ m just mainly abstract vocalization. So when I first started as an undergrad, I called myself a background or experimental vocalist. Now I think of myself as an interdisciplinary vocalist, but I do a lot of looping, and manipulating sound, and getting different noises. I wanted a full-bodied experience, and not just the lungs and the diaphragm. So your full physical body is the instrument, but it’ s also very much your mind, where individualization technically meets in your imagination to access the involuntary muscles that act as your physical instrument, but also your emotional instrument and your dynamic instrument. So with the sound, for me, there’ s so much going on with the voice that I was not taught in school. So I started realizing how powerful that was, and how unfortunate it was to kind of box it up and put it in a similar safe place as a cello