Album Notes

Out of the borough of Queens comes an American avant-garde singer/performance artist armed with a ukelele, a doumbek, and a fierce yodel.

This ambitious debut CD by the eponymous Sukato forges a union between experimentation and traditional music, synthesizing influences of numerous cultures -- largely from Asia, most recognizably Japan, Korea, Tibet, and Indonesia -- with avant-garde sounds.

Over the nearly two and a half hours of this sprawling epic, comes plaintive recorder solos, "prepared" ukeleles, buzzy sitar-like string sounds, darabukkah fingerwork, and an odd assortment of percussion instruments, ranging from bell and gong sounds, to the crack of woodblook-like timbres, to murmuring wind sounds.

Most striking is the enigmatic, if not downright bizarre, voice of Sukato. Her voice uses an array of vocal techniques, including microtonal slides, multiphonics, yodels, and vocables. Her voice soars to startlingly high pitches, which can be ecstatically piercing or as delicate as a wispy gossamer. Her voice is raw, gritty, often unnerving, even wicked at times, but with great dramatic power. She wails, coos, whispers, shouts, and transforms her voice from the wistful to the grotesque, from the yearning to the playful, from the somnolent to the elated.

At one point, on CD2 Track 7, Sukato's voice resembles the expressionist speech/singing of bunraku and facial contortions of butoh. On CD1 Track 5, an extended vocal and drum duet, her voice is closer to that found in Native American traditions, befitting to the shamanistic tone of much of this CD. The pervasive yodel is like that in Iranian music, but not defined by scales: instead, it winds and cascades in a nebulous microtonal field.

This CD was produced entirely by Sukato. All instruments were performed by her.