David Moss summarized the physical immediacy of the voice like this: “Singing and sex give approximate answers to the same question: What does it feel like to be in someone else’s body?” When singer and performance artist Lynn Book left Chicago for New York three months ago, she took with her the city’s most adventurous female voice. Highly expressive, intense, and often theatrical, Book is part of a worldwide wave of outrageous vocal explorers that includes Maggie Nichols, Sainkho Namtchylak, Vanessa Mackness, Dorothea Schurch, Greetje Bijma, and Shelley Hirsch. Adaptive and sly, she uses her flexible set of pipes in many ways: as sheer sound generator spilling out nonsense syllabalia, to construct narratives through a combination of text, gesture, and inflection, or just simply to sing songs. For the last few years, Book’s primary vehicle has been a duet with self-described “hyper avant-experimental-improvising outsider” Tatsu Aoki, the active bassist who recently released a record with pianist Bradley Parker-Sparrow, If It Wasn’t for Paul (Southport). Book’s back in town for this one weekend; this show’s a party to celebrate the release of the debut Book/Aoki CD, Strange Familiar, by her own BOOKish Inc. label. Friday, 8 PM, Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division; 384-5533.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bob Schaeffer.