"The Soul Continues" features Mayhem's Attila Csihar growling from the abyss below resonant bass, uplifting organ, and a sonic wash of movement. Jarboe's soprano is striking braced against this earth-growl and the effect is total ritual release. "Summoning Tigers In Dark Eden" from the Dark Consort online release also bears mention, with music I am at a loss to accurately describe other than that it makes you feel truly adrift in a subconscious, warm, wet, shadowy jungle.

In the wake of post 9/11 when we must shoulder difficult truths if we are to survive as neighbors let alone a human race on this Earth, we need art like Jarboe's Mahakali. While the music of Mahahkali is dedicated to exploring the different faces and roles of the Goddess Kali, (Kali is the feminine of “kala” – “darkness”. Maha is "great".), it is also a rebuttal of pollution and war and underscores how we have wrought much of our own destruction through hateful ignorance and ingrained superstition. Kali is also, above all, a powerful feminine force, capable of goodness as well as rage. It is an apt theme to meditate on in these troubled times. We all have fears with different faces which, when all is said and done, generally stem from fear of death or some form of insecurity. No one wants their life or dreams dashed, whether here or in an afterlife, if such exists.

Terror is an interesting concept. One man's heaven is another's hell, as the saying goes. Jarboe has mentioned on her website that Kali's narrative also discusses Nietzsche's old adage that, “in fighting the monster, one must be careful that one does not become the monster,” which seems to be a relevant message. It is impossible to not think of the squandered finances dumped into the Iraq quagmire or New Orleans' neglected and flooded streets and not shudder. To some the idea of Kali's terrifying countenance grinning back into the eyes of certain war profiteers, who shall go unnamed, is a sweet image indeed.

Mahakali never over does it, even when Jarboe is at her most blood curdling. She is a masterful conduit of characters, whole worlds escaping her to be born into song. Still, while this record is less about Jarboe's own personal life, it can't help but retain a large amount of "her" within its lush scope.

MORGAN Y. EVANS: How are you doing?

JARBOE: I'm very busy ironing out the details of the European tour, which is starting in May. With my interest in wanting to go to specific parts of Eastern Europe, I've been having dialogue with people I know over there. It looks like things are full speed ahead.

MYE: You're going to Prague and Vienna.

JARBOE: Yeah. We did Moscow in 2005, and I'm looking forward to playing Moscow again and also St. Petersburg this time around. I haven't played there yet.

MYE: Besides different places that you try to perform, do you ever try to tailor your performances to different audiences you might want to communicate something else to in various parts of the world?

JARBOE: The only thing I've done differently live for certain audiences is talking to the people before the performance. I would be very conscious of articulation so the words would be understood better, overly articulated. Trying to emphasize things in a certain way to be really clear for communication. For the most part, like for a lot of performers, the audience kind of determines the performance. Unless it's a rote, kind of regimented performance. A lot of the stadium shows are set to computers underneath the stage. That show is exactly the same every night. Even if Madonna banters to the audience, she's got so many seconds to do that every night. The computer is running underneath. I've had friends who've been tech experts on these massive tours and I've been fascinated with the mechanization of how these tours operate. How many computers and things are run specifically with time ticking by. Unless you are doing something like that [laughing] with lighting and dancers and trapdoors, then I think the show, for other performers, and certainly for what I do...the audience has an impact on how that performance turns out. We've all read interviews where the artist says, "If the audience gives then the performer gives," so it's this exchange, you know?

I've had to, in my career, especially being so brazen and without any doubt, going to New York and getting in Swans when I did, I entered into a world of skinheads and angry, violent audiences. Throwing things at us and a lot of hostility towards me. Early on when we were playing a lot of halls and early tours, people that worked in the venues and audiences were pretty violent. What was good about that was that I learned to transcend the environment on stage. I did it pretty easily. I did it effortlessly. Anything can happen and I don't miss a note. One festival in Slovenia comes to mind, an outdoor festival. Things were thrown at me while I was singing, and I was hit and I didn't break character or posture. I continued to sing with severity and tremendous emotion. I always react to the audience and I will continue to give, but it is more of a philosophical attitude where I'm not allowed to be pushed around or phazed by negative energy. My attitude is, "my will is going to overcome your will." This has taught me a great deal. You continue to give and the audience picks up on it. It's this interesting language that happens, which is why I love the stage so much.

In my case, I generally leave the stage. The last few years I've done most of my singing from the audience. I would recommend it to singers! To heck with your monitor. Use the P.A. as your monitor. Unless you're going to use an in-ear monitor, why not just go out and use the P.A. and hear what the audience is hearing? It's exciting, and plus it puts you in a place of vulnerability and trust. It's different than diving off the stage and having the audience carry you. It's different than that, but it's still a trust. The cool thing about it, with me, is except for one time, no one has ever laid a hand on me. They've all made a circle around me and allowed me to do what I do. The one time I was touched I was in my sacrificial body language that I've done as far back as the Swans shows, where you are in such a place of humility and openness and vulnerability. You might even be on your knees or down on the floor. A girl held her hand out and embraced me as I stood up, so that was kinda cool. [laughing] I've never had any hostile action while being in the crowd.

As a person who's studied spiritual things all her life, true strength is in vulnerability and humility. When you have this angry attitude and chip on your shoulder and you get on stage, to me that's coming from a place of fear and lack of trust. I don't understand that when I see that. I see strength in people that have no wall or division. They're going for a union, rather than a separation.

MYE: Talking about fearlessness, whether it applies to music or creation or when you came to New York...A lot of people anticipate failure or falling or obviously being different. Life can be very uncertain at times. There's this "Cup of Insanity" and people have to decide how far to drink from it.

JARBOE: The first thing you need to do is think about what success means. For me it means doing something on my own terms, not from an ego place but from a place that's genuine and that I feel I am taking a risk and maybe, I use this term, the "boardroom" would disagree with it. I don't care what the boardroom has to say. Some of my friends would say I was always the punk rocker in Swans and I'm still the punk rocker, meaning that I don't really care what advisors say. I have to keep doing what is true to my vision. That to me is success. If you keep doing something and believing in it and aren't compromising what you want to do, there's always excitement there so you stay inundated and aren't gonna get bored. You keep on hacking the machete through the jungle. [laughing] That's what I do and I'm probably going to keep on doing it until I die! [laughing]

MYE: [laughing] Good to hear! Speaking of which, the new album, parts of it seem like it is examining life and death aspects. Certainly Kali is known for duality. I was also thinking of an Aztec Goddess, Coatlicue. She was both grave and creative womb, though she was subverted somewhat by Christians and made more benign. They took away some of her power and combined elements with other deities to water her ferocious side down. I don't think that happened with Kali as much.

JARBOE: Kali, the Mahakali symbol was chosen because it summarized the underlying theme of the material. It's the first album I've done where the topic was outside of myself. That was groundbreaking for me. It's more of a global topic. It's not about me and my feelings and heartbreak. It was much more ambitious to present something like this. I consider it a major step as a songwriter for me. They're not diaristic lyrics and they're not love songs. So to follow The Men Album,which was all about that stuff, with something that was motivated by war and by the global climate change and the crisis and turmoil of the Earth, that was what I was going for right down to who I selected to work on this album with me. Maybe it's too inside, but with "Overthrown", I was inspired for that song by where my family is from, which is, of course, that's NOLA, New Orleans. I was thinking about Louisiana and I approached Philip (Anselmo) because he's from there. To approach that song with a blues voicing, we talked about New Orleans and our family roots. That was why I asked him to do that. I wanted that to really be the heart of that album, to have him stripped down with very little accompaniment—Julia Kent on cello and Colin (Marston) on some slide guitar. So that, the elements there, specifically I was using Katrina as a metaphor for that. That was our connection there. So to go beyond my writing from personal history—even on the Neurosis and Jarboe album I was writing from extreme personal history, perhaps more than ever. This was a major step for me, to be less concerned with that and writing from a much bigger awareness outside of myself. That's why the Mahakali theme was chosen.

MYE: And it has a lot of persona in the topic also, I mean, of that theme, whether world events or the different sides of Kali's faces, if you know what I mean?

JARBOE: Yeah. Somebody asked me the other day, she's a DJ and she was saying it was interesting as a woman I chose to put a photo of myself looking like that instead of some sexy picture. [laughing] That takes a lot of courage, or something. I don't think I've ever gone for anything really sexy. Even when I'm nude, it's not sexy. It's been more scary. Richard Kern's photos from Anhedoniac are pretty horrific. So, I thought that was funny. I think a lot of women are going more for that kind of thing. I guess if I were to do it, it would be pretty shocking. [laughing] The cover for Mahakali was a photo shoot that was taken into photo shop, but it is an actual photo with the tongue extended a bit. But I held that pose for hours with all sorts of close ups from different angles and staring and my eyeballs falling out, wearing body paint with a black and red texture on it. The photo shoot itself was a whole part of it, 'cuz even that was a performance.

MYE: It's an intense photograph. I was looking at the Tibetan Book of the Dead recently and on the 13th Day, there are these beings called the Eight Wrathful Ones. They have animal heads and are very scary. Then it says they are thoughtforms of people's own intellectual faculties and as you die, when you see them you don't have to be afraid. It's evidence of our capabilities and different sides.

JARBOE: Right.

MYE: When I saw your album cover I thought of that, which is not Tibetan, but you are drawing on different sources and putting it back out there for people to interpret. A lot of artists don't have that range and it is admirable.

JARBOE: It's interesting that you say that. They are just CDRs. I might make the leap to manufacturing them but I just did a series of CDR's called the Stream Enterer series that are available just on my website. That is me reading one English translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

MYE: Wow. I swear I didn't know you'd done that!

JARBOE: Yeah. It's Stream Enterer, we call it. It's three volumes on CDR, SE1, 2, and 3. I made a set of images on card stock you can frame, with an image program I was learning, of images that were like, morphing. One was the Buddha and there were very abstract versions of demons. That was part of it. It was art and my interpretations of going through the phases you just mentioned. What I was trying to do with my artwork,'cuz what you were getting from me was narration, a little bit of music...I did it with two other musicians...It is narration, the voice changing and then the art.

This came about from, I had read that in college, but doing Stream Enterer came about from a friend of mine, possibly, I hate to say my best friend but one of my best friends. A woman friend that I loved, she and I did a lot of things together. We had an active social life together. We were already trying to schedule when we were going to go out and do something together again. She had a column, a nationally syndicated column about women's issues. Her name was Diane Glass. Unbelievably, she felt strange one day and went to the doctor and it was less than ten days that she was dead. She had some kind of rare form of tumor that killed her and it was asymptomatic, so she didn't know she had it.

I was so full of grief over this, and she had asked me, they moved her home to die and she had her sister ask me to come over there and sing to her before she died. I went over there to her house and it was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, singing to her and not falling apart. She was gripping my hand. That was on a Friday night and she died early on Sunday morning. I turned to this man who was a spiritual advisor who was there, and how upset I was over it, and he told me to read the Bardo to her, to take her through the Bardo. I went out and I got this translation for her and I did it fully and I did it every single day. It's like 40 days of reading this thing. I did it faithfully every single day with a photo of her and things that belonged to her and it culminated with me taking it so far that I went all the way out to California and was standing on a cliff and had a bag of her stuff. I finished it out there and I threw the stuff into the Pacific Ocean for her.

MYE: [quietly] Wow.

JARBOE: The weird thing about it was, she was an animal rights activist and she had rescue dogs that were gonna be killed in her home. When I finished that last reading, this is still amazing to me...I turned around and a large dog came running up the side of this incline and came running up to me wagging its' tail all happy. I saw that and I was like, "Oh my God, look at that!" I didn't see anybody, any people around anywhere. I will never forget that. So after reading it and getting intimate with this text and reading exactly what you said, the fact that you see all these demons, all these horrific things coming to you, you know...One is eating its’ own intestines. You are told you are manufacturing it. This isn't real. It's just an illusion. This interested me. I thought it was an incredible metaphor about as humans, how much we manufacture with our awareness.

What we think is there often isn't. How much we relate to our ego, which is a social mask we put on. Emotions are not us. Emotions are this chemical thing that happens and they move through you and then they're not there anymore. You're all wrapped up in your sadness and you're all wrapped up in your happiness and it's kind of like, you're bouncing around like this monkey, you know? ([aughing]

MYE: [laughing]

JARBOE: You learn not to be afraid of your emotions and they come into you, but they're gonna be passing through. It's kind of like, "Hey! Come on in!" This really can change your life. The Book of the Dead. I was so enthralled by this text and what it was saying and that's why I decided to record it. I invited some musicians to do audio and express themselves. So we did this. The people that come to my site have heard it and they've all gotten something from it, so maybe it was a good thing to do as something to possibly instill awareness or a directive to people that wouldn't have gotten it otherwise.

MYE: That's a wild coincidence. I can't wait to hear it.

JARBOE: Yeah. Well, I gave the series to some people in music and producers I know and see what they think about it, 'cuz it was so experimental, and I got a thumbs up about it. They thought it was a bold and brazen thing to do, but it's almost like a rock background to it and fierce guitar. It's not like you're gonna hear bells and other music. It's not new age, let me put it that way. [laughing]

MYE: When you collaborate with vocalists versus primarily an instrumentalist like Justin Broderick (Jesu,Godflesh) do you differentiate it from other instruments?

JARBOE: Yeah, it's two fold. Even with the instruments you have a character, I use that word loosely, in mind, a voicing to fit the story. Then you choose, or I choose, a particular person, because I can hear them doing it or I know they have it in them, but also, I'm gonna stretch them, so to speak. I'll be like a director on a movie set and I tell them the foundation but to keep going and add their own ideas to it. In some cases there might be some encouragement but in other cases I'm hands off. The Men Album is a great example of that because I worked with so many singers on that. In the case of, say, Alan Sparhawk or any of these people I invited into my song, I had to have trust with what they would do. They weren't co-writing it or anything. The big step is picking the right people, and if you pick the right people then you don't have to worry about it too much. You do look at their voice like an instrument, though, and I'm not that sure there's that much difference. I think the way I've always been a musician, keyboard player or an arranger, is through the way I sing. On (Swans) The Burning World album we had all these guest musicians like Shankar and all these people, and I hummed and sang their parts to them. Shankar on "Let It Come Down" was doing a violin melody. I sang that to him. It all goes through the way I sing. It's the instrument that's coming from your body. So if I sit down at a piano, I'm playing that as if it's coming from inside me. It's almost this expression from your heart or something, an internal way. Probably a lot of musicians play that way. Jazz guys, you'll see them move their mouths or whatever. [laughing]

MYE: Yeah, Thelonious Monk. [laughing]

JARBOE: Yeah. I don't know that there is that much of a difference. Sometimes singers are perhaps a bit more shy. You have to encourage them to add more. With Attilla (Csihar - Mayhem, Arborym, Burial Chamber Trio), he did some things and I liked it, and I encouraged him to run with it. More! More! Be the voice of dying. Be the voice of faith. Be the voice of pain. He ran wild with all these tracks. And I really wanted everybody to hear all those tracks, and that's why I intentionally and deliberately did a weird, phazed soprano as a mantra. I think that decision to go into the upper register freaked out some people. It's funny, I don't have a problem with the soprano. You just have to see the voice as a textural component. Get away from it as a statement a person is making when they choose to go into a soprano as opposed to a growl. [laughing] There's a lot of resistance, I think, and I don't understand that resistance.

MYE: Speaking of resistance, you mentioned with this album you were dealing with some external things like war and of course there's a lot of problems in the world, but, your music always seems to break down resistance in some people and expands minds. Sure, it scares some people sometimes! Not everyone, gets scared. But, I was thinking of the Swans song "In My Garden", talking about growth and death, and also this new material. What do you think will enable humanity to move forward? It seems like so much conflict in the world comes from people not accepting themselves or differences.

JARBOE: Well, gosh, it's hard to be put in a position to tell other people what to do. I've tried very recently to just say what has worked for me or think is working, because it is all process. It's funny because on the social networking sites like MySpace, for example, when I'm able to get on there and go to the inbox, there's really a huge amount of mail I get from people I don't know asking me spiritual questions or philosophical questions—lifestyle questions or attitude. I'm always kind of mystified that I'm seen as someone who has these answers. And I blogged about it awhile ago that I can't answer every single one because there's so many. So I made a blog and tried to say that for me, I've gotten a lot out of the ideas that are freeing from studying Buddhism.

Buddhism is not a religion. You can have any religion you want and still study it, practice it. It's a philosophy and attitude rather than a worship situation. for me, I have to continually keep up with that. You can do that with a teacher, or a community of people you meet, or books. You have to, um.. You have to get away from the programming and social conditioning that, at least I had. I think a lot of people have it. You have to keep on getting the message and hammer it in to where it is more ingrained in you because you're going against all this conditioning. The conditioning is what I think you're talking about because it leads to constant dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

The biggest thing in a lot of cultures like this one is the "What If" syndrome. “’What If’ I was dating Betty?” or "’What if" I married Bob?” everything would be great. Then if my wedding ring was as big as my neighbors, or if I had the clothes that so and so had... All the things we think growing up. It's always "what if" instead of seeing how temporary all that is. I'm more excited by ideas like books and what an artist is doing and what composers are doing—the sound and sight and ideas that came from somebody, than I am with keeping up with what is supposed to be cool. As long as people are caught up in keeping up with that or how success is determined by our ego, then I think it's a path to ...pretty much misery for ever! [laughing] It takes a lot of guts to sort of say that, but look at how much of that has surrounded us all the time? Like, I love looking at avant-garde fashion design. Still, if I pick up a fashion magazine, no matter how extreme it is, like Oyster from Australia or I-D from England, it's full of ads. So even ideas can be in the context of this "what if".

MYE: It's a weird juxtaposition.

JARBOE: And musicians, there's opportunities that are there now. You can join Tune Core or bypass record labels. Again, it's the old chicken or egg situation. What's a record label supposed to do for you? They're supposed to be able to have the money for advertisements and publicists to get you out there. Well, you can do that on your own if you have funding. However, there's still this weird status with being associated with a label. These bands come to me and some of them make really great music. Some of them I've gotten to know and all they want from me is, "Can you get us on a label?" If I could even do such a thing, why are labels still the carrot in front of the horse?

MYE: Some people create fake ones now just to seem more "together".

JARBOE: Yeah, a friend of mine did that and he was able to get all these distribution deals. [laughing]

MYE: Yeah. If it works, hey! But it is funny. It's like a Western movie where the buildings are all facades.

JARBOE: I did act as kind of an A&R for a couple of groups for a label that I felt didn't have any bad acts on it. I'd tell them to knock on that door. But, I think what they want from it is that "what if” syndrome. That's what I think leads to disappointment and unhappiness because you have expectations.

MYE: And sometimes people compromise the tone of their own material.

JARBOE: Exactly. That's the thing...there's expectations and it's kind of like, you have to just keep moving forward and do what you want to do or else you're just making the product for them. I was really happy with the issue of The Wire with Antony on the front, Antony and the Johnsons. I had heard there was a review in it. I was happy with the writer getting it. He said something like "the alignment she has done on the Mahakali album with this avant metal world is ironic because she and Gira sort of created that genre." [laughing] I thought that was hilarious. Finally! That's exactly what I was trying to do. But he also said, "Just because I use the word ‘metal’ don't think it's an easy go for the ‘metal’ dollar because it’s hot right now." That's exactly true too.

What I learned from doing the Mahakali album, and also working with some bands that are on these metal labels, a lot of bands are all doing the blast beats and there's a real formula to that music. I am unable to have any interest in that formula, to say something has to sound like something else. I can't fit into that formula and that's why record companies probably hate me. I can't fit in to an easy dollar category.

MYE: It's funny, because some of your music is much more emotionally "intense" than yet another breakdown, or whatever.

JARBOE: I was happy with that review and kind of amazed because I don't know that writer and it is gratifying if they see the ideas of what you were trying to do. That's the first one I've seen that kind of got it. And the intentional distortion on my record, Yes! It is intentional! it's supposed to be that way. There's distorted vocals and guitar. All kinds of distortion on this thing. I don't like things to sound clinical. It's always gonna have that vibe to it no matter who's behind it or what kind of funding.

MYE: I wanted to ask you about some of the musical tones you wanted to convey, what you wanted to represent for this work, and also how you differentiated between what material would be on Mahakali and what would be on the online companion album Dark Consort?

JARBOE: Well, the idea of having three different versions of the album was having different bonus tracks. Some of the songs that were really intended to be bonus tracks ended up being part of the main body of the album. Every single version, the Season of Mist version, the jewel case and digi-pack versions for The End, they all have different bonus tracks on them. Some of them are the Kali Lamentations. We decided to do some of those and also do a full CD that we just manufactured. It's not on any label. The idea was that this would be a website driven CD. Because I always like to have things specifically for people that will go to the trouble and order things from the website. Cut out the middle man.

You get three versions, plus an entire CD of bonus tracks of experimental lamentations based on ancient texts about Kali. If fits into the theme of being able to inform. My idea was diehard fans would be able to put everything into their iPod and be able to shift it around and hear the Lamentations and then some songs. If it was my ultimate album it would be all these songs with that in between, a massive exploration of that Goddess. So, I think in that way it is satisfying in the context of the other albums.

The song "House Of Void" has two versions. One is particularly gritty and that is the one with Scott Hull from Pig Destroyer. He had more distortion and levels on the guitars. The one in the jewel case is more of a Vinnie (Signorelli) mix, lots of drums and voice and everything else kind of low.

MYE: That song is very vast.

JARBOE: That one was intentionally distorted for the lead vocal because I thought it was cool. That vocal and some of the vocals I flew into another one of the mixes were recorded in an unusual way. I was studying disciplines like what it means to be possessed or to be an oracle or shapeshift. These are areas that I like for obvious reasons because I kind of do it [laughing] when I perform. Many characters and voices.

So I was into Solomonic magic, and had a magic circle, and I suspended a microphone above the circle and ran it up above the house into the computer to record, and recorded some of the vocals that way myself. That particular vocal I did that way. This is an interesting field to study too. I've encouraged my fans to study that. You learn a lot about the power of the mind. In that case, there's these 72 demons and spirits, and they also manifest in different horrific ways and do different things, and it is all through the power of our subconscious mind. Witches and practitioners are divided in this, but that's what I think. We manifest these things in our minds.

So again, it's even related to the Bardo. Don't be afraid, you have to try and control it. Not even control it. You have to control your reaction to it. There's no point in getting upset because this is a manifestation of your own doubts. It’s so easy to say that, but as we can imagine, when you're involved in that, it's pretty hard! [laughing]

MYE: "Transmogrification", that song title, I wondered if you were trying to challenge yourself with that title since you are known for being so versatile.

JARBOE: It's literally what happens in that song. Kris Force (Amber Asylum) and I did a Baltic tour. We did Riga, Latvia and Vilnius, Lithuania, and some shows in Tallin, Estonia in 2004. We were doing a show in Latvia, and she was the one who said she got behind me when she was playing the violin and she watched right in front of her. Her word was "channel". She said I physically changed and channeled. I had been loosely aware of it because when I perform I would sometimes leave and become so involved in the performance that I wasn't really there. Changes that happen, say, in "I Crawled" where I go from a "la-la-la" little girl voice to very guttural cookie monster growl in the end, those were done effortlessly with no forethought. It's like being possessed and portraying the story of Michael's words about what was happening to that character as she is being strangled to death. When I was singing it was a she. She is the girl and then at the end she's kind of merging with the beast that is behind her, shaking her. That's when she's saying, "Now, ride. Ride. Ride. Ride." And then she becomes the beast.

So that to me was a real clear example of shapeshifting. It's not artifice. You don't have to sit down, pencil behind your ear and a notepad and, "Hmmm, I think I'll do this". It just happens when you're performing and you get so into what it's about. Your shields are down and you let energy take over. I'm not the only one it happens to. Apparently it happens to a lot of vocalists. It's an interesting phenomenon. Maybe it's from being so in tune with everything. It's funny, another person, Steve Von Till from Neurosis, he said in an interview when we were doing Neurosis/Jarboe that, "Jarboe feels music more than the rest of us do." I think, in a way, what he was saying was the same kind of thing. You're putting your filters and shields down. You have to have a devil-may-care attitude to do that and hurl yourself into the void. As a woman doing this for so many years, you can't worry about how ugly you look or how distorted your facial expression is or if you're frothing at the mouth. [laughing] You're not posing for the camera at that time.

MYE: Recently you worked on the video game The Path with the people from Tale Of Tales, where the music changes depending on your choices?

JARBOE: For the game, the designers told me they were looking for me for inspiration and it is based on early versions of Little Red Riding Hood, before it was cleaned up. This is a more adult, not meaning sexual, but graphically violent approach to it. The wolves are rather ferocious and violently rip into the girls. With that they wanted voicings and melodies to fit and music to fit the different characters. They didn't want to do a game with actual talking. They wanted the songs to represent what happens, rather than talking. They gave me the list of all the wolves and little girls and scenes. Grandma's house or whatever. I had to come up with music that was the audio illustration of what was happening.

I would call myself the composer, musical editor, and the voices. I use my voice as a territorial component and also do the voices of the different wolves. Then, because I knew this was going to be extremely difficult technically, I asked Kris Force, 'cuz Kris has worked on The Sims as a professional sound designer. I asked Kris if, would she then work with me as the person to do whatever was involved to execute things at a certain moment in the game. I did the music and she designed what I did with the animation to follow.

MYE: That's nice to have an inside person on that.

JARBOE: Yeah. Well, believe me, it is pretty daunting.

MYE: I heard about it and was like, "No way! Whoa!"

JARBOE: It was very hard work. We'd been on call as a team for years as they were developing it. They developed it in stages because it was an independent project. They presented it in Europe and San Francisco at the game conference to get funding for it. As we got funding for it we were able to keep on, keep on, keep on working. Finally it's gonna launch. This March at the International Game Conference in San Francisco Kris and I are going to do a performance. It's at the Yerba Buena Art Center in San Fransisco to help launch the game, and then there's going to be an awards ceremony and a dinner. I'm gonna fly out there for that and be involved. They wanted to do different horror themed games and if I would be interested...

I would love to do that. I hope they would do one around Medusa. You know what I mean? Different kind of characters where I could be in my element. I like the sick juxtaposition of little melodies and then turning around and being the beast from hell. I'm comfortable with that, so I think the horror world is something I'm probably a natural for. [laughing]

Another interesting thing I did last year, I beat out a bunch of actresses in Los Angeles to be a voice for The Venture Brothers cartoon show. That was a lot of fun. It was doing dialogue and perfectly matching it, because they animated it first. That was fun. I liked doing that a lot.

MYE: It helps you work on specific timing.

JARBOE: Exactly, and then you have to maintain character. In this case, it was a white, southern maid that had no education! [laughing] She had a really strong accent.

MYE: It's like doubling a vocal in the studio. People don't know what a pain in the ass that can be sometimes.

JARBOE: Especially when you're having to sing with someone who's phrasing is completely different like Michael. I had to do that and counterpoint and harmony. There's a project going on now, this woman from Norway is doing a re-recording of a song that Nina Hagen and Lene Lovich did in the 80's called "Don't Kill The Animals". It was a pop song with a dance beat that was a hit in the 80's. This woman is recording it and has asked me to sing it. Her engineer with her is going to use my voice, use her voice and then our voices together. Then, talk about difficulty in doubling, it's probably the most difficult doubling I've ever done in my life because she's Norwegian, it has a dance beat and is pop. Our phrasing is...nowhere [laughing] the same. She's asked me to do parts one more time and I'm thinking, "Oh boy," because what I did took days. [laughing] She'd already recorded it. It's quirky. YouTube the original and you'll see what I'm up against. I took it as a challenge because I thought it'd be fun, and now I'm thinking ,"Hmmm." I told her straight off that I'm a character vocalist and she wasn't gonna get poppy, straight vocals from me, so if she could live with that, ok. Since it was "Don't Kill The Animals" I couldn't resist giving her some growls. [laughing]

MYE: I just interviewed Travis Ryan from Cattle Decapitation and I wanted to ask you about your cameo on their new The Harvest Floor album.

JARBOE: See, I'm glad you mention him. He's another one that I have read about in interviews that he leaves and transforms on stage. He's not himself as the guy you're talking to later. He apparently does this, which I believe. I could not take my eyes off of him because I was so, um...trying to think of a word that's not cliche...blown away, that's cliche. Devastated, that isn't right. Awestruck. That's corny. But, I was awestruck by his performance.

Technically, in one song and pretty much every song, he leaps between all those voices he's got. He does it effortlessly. That is impressive to me. It's so seamless. It's incredible and it’s no effects. He does that low raspy voice and high voice for the entire show. I was just standing there thinking I had to ask him about his technique for the entire show I saw them. "How is he doing that? How is he doing that?" [laughing] He was literally still wiping the sweat off his forehead and I pounced on him. [laughing] He said, "I don't know technique. I've just been doing it for so many years." So he wouldn't share his secrets with me, but I'm still intrigued by that 'cuz I've never seen something so extreme before. Like Dani Filth from Cradle of Filth does that a little bit, but to me, it's not the same. It's not as extreme as what Travis is doing. It's not as acrobatic, and Dani doesn't do as much of the low stuff. He does the high, scary, screamy voice. It's fascinating to me when vocalists are doing these acrobatic gestures. That's when you see they are using the throat as an instrument.

MYE: You have to find a pocket for it without destroying it.

JARBOE: I read an article when I first started listening to black metal that said a lot of those vocalists develop vocal nodes and are unable to sing any other way, especially if they do a cookie monster growl. They can't sing a ballad anytime soon.

MYE: They want it that way.

JARBOE: They destroy it. But how was the collaboration? It all came about through Billy Anderson, the engineer involved with the Soundtracks For The Blind Swans album. We went in as a band in San Francisco and all played live instead of multi-tracking. That's how I met Billy and that album has sentimental value to me, obviously. He wrote me and asked if I'd be involved with what he was currently producing. He sent me the track and I took it from there. I did what I thought was subtle and accented what was there. Interestingly enough, it's the only song like that on the album. Slower and has more melody. It kind of stands out. I'm really glad I did it and got to meet those guys. I'd enjoy maybe working with them live or something soon, but that's how that came about. It's funny 'cuz I went to see them when they came to Atlanta and it was really funny standing in the audience and hearing myself through the P.A. [laughing]

MYE: Avant garde musician [laughing] David Torn, who worked on The Men Album, I've been friends with his son Elijah since I was a kid, and just realized David collaborated with you on that record! I was wondering how it was working with him when you did that record?

JARBOE: I had so many people involved in that and getting copies too when it came out. I never heard from David, so I hope he got a copy. But anyway, he did different ideas. The thing I wound up using, he took the original song and turned it around and did this interlude with it, so I gave him full writing credit. Full compositional credit. He didn't use any of the original recording material, I don't think. I liked the interlude more than the original song. The song had a vocal on it and I'd been doing different versions of it, and I felt in terms of the context of the album that it didn't fit. I didn't need another version of it. So his writing on the full version, I didn't use, but I used the interlude. It's really good. It stands out and is very unusual. That's what I wanted, to let people be creative.

Same thing with Percy Howard or Iva Davies from Icehouse, I really wanted to have their aesthetic as part of the tapestry. It's my song but their production or interpretation. It was really hands off. I told David J to remove a lot of the echo-delay on the version he did, because he added a huge amount of delay that made it kind of murky, but that was about all. But with Blixa (Bargeld - Einsterzende Neubauten, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds), that's another example of working with a vocalist where I simply told him to do the introduction and I'd put it in the song.

It was a Victorian Madhouse where things were very barbaric and primitive in terms of what they did to people that were termed "mad". They're running around, and imagine the cells and the rats and the filth. The eerie atmosphere. If you wear headphones you can hear what he did. He had the mic and would literally run circles around the mic and back and get right up on it and smack his lips. You hear all these mouth sounds and puttering together of his teeth like in Hellraiser. You have to put on headphones to hear all the subtle stuff that Blixa did, but he definitely made it as the voice of madness.

MYE: That's what it's all about.

JARBOE: Well, someone like that is a master. Such a legend and you bow before. You don't tell them what to do. You gently give ideas that you're going for and then you back away really fast. [laughing]

MYE: Well, a lot of people would feel that way about you, too.

JARBOE: Where are they? [laughing]

MYE: They're definitely out there.