“Today I call myself an interdisciplinary artist”, Odeya Nini told magpie. “My practice is one that is an experience of the aural, visual, mental and physical.” She’s bringing that experience to The Arts Center at NYUAD on 9 October, and we are expecting great things from the performance.
Odeya Nini is an LA-based experimental vocalist and composer whose work stretches the definition of music. She’s interested in textural harmony, gesture, tonal animation, and the illumination of minute sounds, and in her solo vocal work that’s extended to include the body as well as the voice.
Nini has collaborated with dancers, visual artists, filmmakers, and theatre directors as both a composer and soloist; she has lectured on contemporary vocal techniques, composition, and the intersection with holistic practices; and she leads vocal sound baths, workshops, and retreats exploring the healing qualities of embodied voice.
But her musical journey started in a much more conventional milieu. “I began with a love for theatre as a child and had a deep love for the embodiment of characters and story,” she told us. “I went on to study theatre throughout high school, but I eventually realised music was where I could express myself more fully and within my own parameters.” So singing in musicals wasn’t enough; prewritten scripts and prescribed ways of performing on a theatre stage weren’t enough, and she attended New York’s New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music as an undergraduate.
That BFA course is where she discovered improvisation, and ultimately free improvisation. “It was the world of playing with extending my instrument in an improv ensemble, listening to the sounds of our environment and trying to create that sound with my voice, looking at a graphic score or reading a text score and interpreting it in my own time, dynamics, sounds, expression, harmony, that revealed to me a world of freedom, a freedom that is composition in real time. The presence and the type of listening and concentration I needed to ‘free improv’ introduced a mental and physical state of being as a musician that I found great satisfaction in.”
When she started free improvising she realised she could make her own way in singing, find her own comfort zone. In an interview she has described how transformative this was. “With any challenge I had with my voice — like if I was running out of breath — I could follow my own rhythm and listen in a different way. Whatever came up, I would turn that into something musical. I could improvise with texture and the shape of my mouth to get different kinds of sounds, which took me away from notes, pitches, melodies … I found a whole world of sounds that I could make.”
At the same time she was also studying to be a yoga instructor, and that too had a major impact on the development of her art. “Yoga, with its mind-body connection and the awareness of breath and meditation, seemed to run in parallel with performing jazz and improvising. That was the real aha! moment for me as an artist.”
Her chamber music compositions are rather different to her performances for voice, not least because she writes vocal music only for her own voice and instrumental music only for other performers. “My vocal practice is a personal one – I am interested in discovering the abilities of my own voice and expression, embodiment, and resonance. I practice becoming a vessel for what wants to move through me and feel the dynamic energy of my breath move my sound through the room and audience.”
The result in her performance pieces is a kind of structured improvisation. “The process begins with writing – I journal about where I am and what I am thinking about, and what arc I imagine. So I have roadmaps and sounds premeditated, but the structure is open. I let the resonance of the space, and the people in front of me, guide my performance.” So it is an improvisation, which she describes as “as composition in real time”.
Ode is a vocal performance in six pieces, released on album in 2022 and described by one reviewer as “well suited to those who are interested in listening experiences over melodic content”. They also described the tracks as “sound poems”, and Odeya Nini is happy enough with that – “yes, I very much feel my music to be like sound poetry – the kind of poetry that pulls words and imagery in from various directions to both disorient you and focus you. The kind of poetry that you feel was written only for you”.
In those pieces Nini explores a wide collection of styles and harmonic ranges with her own voice, sometimes as collages of sounds. The result is a landscape of textural and tonal shifts that range from melodic lyrical passages to earthy, body-deep growls.
For her Abu Dhabi performance, Nini won’t be merely reprising the album. “Ode is meant to be a title that could apply to any variation of my performance – the performance itself is an ode. So I will perform some pieces that are on the album, others that are not.”
And while some of the album pieces are multitracked, the Arts Center performance will be solo unamplified voice with no electronic aids. For some pieces she will be accompanying herself with the drone of a shruti box, an Indian instrument that uses a system of bellows, and the soft, soothing vibrations of flow chimes used in meditation and sound healing.
From the audience’s viewpoint, Ode is about the listening experience rather than the melodic content. When she sings, Nini is mindful of every part of her body as a force of expression, and at times she literally embodies the sounds she’s making – getting on her knees and contracting her body to reach a deep, harsh tone, for instance, if that’s what it takes.
The result is in many ways the essence of art, the ability for the individual to contribute something to the piece they’re seeing or hearing or observing. “I remember when I first encountered Richard Serra’s work and how in complete awe I was of how I was invited to engage with it,” Nini told magpie. “When I think of the many things that have influenced me, what they have in common is space for me to imagine more than what is there – art or performance or sound that leaves room for me to make it my own. It is the quality of the abstract space that has drawn me in and inspired me.”
“I want people to feel my music,” Nini has said. “I want to create a performance that is an experience where people respond with a feeling, not a reflection of what they heard but what they felt.”
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