Part 1

Name: Eric Chenaux
Nationality: Canadian
Occupation: Singer, songwriter
Recent release: Eric Chenaux's Delights Of My Life, recorded with Ryan Driver (Wurlitzer, voice) and Philippe Melanson (electronic percussion, voice) is out May 31st 2024 via Constellation.

If you enjoyed these thoughts by Eric Chenaux and would like to find out more about his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram.

For a deeper dive, we recommend our earlier Eric Chenaux interview about improvisation.
 


Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in your voice and singing? How and when did you start singing?

Hello again, Fifteen Questions. How wonderful.

I really have no idea when and why I started singing or when and, for the most part, why I started doing much of anything at all. We historicize our origins to form a narrative that we can live with. One of the many things I love about music is that it is an encounter, or a place, or a space, or just a thing where we can experiment without the need, desire or drive for that narrative. I sang as a kid. As many do. My mother reminds me of that, as mothers do.

There is more than likely something quite miraculous for one to hear their own voice rise and fall in a melody.

If you're also playing other instruments, how does the expressive potential of these compare to your own voice?

I think that I will borrow a term from my friend Ryan Driver who credits vocals as “human voice”. This notation is a reminder that quite possibly everything has a voice. Hard to verify I imagine but easy to imagine I can verify. With that in mind it is easy for us to think that we have specific relationships and intimicies with certain voices and the encounter with these diverse and singular voices expand our very idea of the voice.

It is interesting that you ask about the expressive potential of voices. When we talk about the human body we often speak of expression (the painter’s brush-expression, the dancer’s movement-expression, the singer’s melodic-expression or emotive-expression, we could go on). I would like to wonder about expression and if all voices are always expressing - is this their action?, is this what they are always doing? I am not sure about this. How could I be? Can and does a voice do other things? Do voices produce something other than an encounter with an expression?

I am going to take a chance on “no they do not”. Expression is one way in which we make sense of our own encounter with voices. And one that can be quite frutiful, and one of many artefacts of the voice voicing.

In my music I play guitar and, well, human voice (to continue borrowing from Ryan). They are quite distinct and I do not ask  them to diminish their distinctivenesses to create a unified whole. The music is not a unity but a dance of shared diversities. My human voices (I do not know if I have one or many and how many--think of Sizzla, we can not say that he has “a” voice, there are a barrage of human voices on a Sizzla record)---and the sounds and voices that come from the space inbetween my hands and feet and guitar do not see the world in the same way and they do not weave their way through a melody or a song in the same way.

I do not think I can easily describe or denote the differences but I think that we can hear them! Oh yes, I have heard that it is obvious. My musical practice has become a place where I wonder about music with these voices that do not see eye to eye on things and I ask them to share a space together again and again and again, so that we can see what happens together.

Perhaps, at times, they do see things similarily, and at times take great pains to suffer each other. It sounds to me that I am talking about a contra-puntal ensemble rather than a neccesarily harmonious one. I am not sure that my music always knows.

Hell, music must leave some wiggle room for the encounter with the listener! Without it I can not imagine a lovely reason for it’s existence.

Singing is an integral part of all cultures, and traditions. Which of these do you draw from – and why?

I believe you. That sounds right to me but I find it difficult to know this and most definitely not capable of explaining why. So I will use this space to speak of  some traditional musics that form a part of my music listening.

I very much enjoy listening to English, Scottish and Irish folk and traditional musics, from sung ballads to fiddle music, bagpipes, tenor banjos and a whole host of other instruments. The melodies of this music, the cadences of these voices, the ornaments of the melodies’ performance produce a truly amazing listening world, not to mention the wild and unsentimental and amoral sentiments and goings-on in the lyrical content of the songs that propel much of this music forward on the strange and wild line of a traditional ballad.

I can say some similar things about Sean Nos singing, Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, Laotian, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Tin Pan Alley, Hip Hop … it seems that my idea of what is a traditional music is sliding towards all music.

[Read our feature on the Hardanger fiddle]

I can not tell if this is a problem or not. Yes and no I suppose. I can not know exactly what that might be saying. I do not know how I am using the term traditional here and that makes me feel uneasy.

Your question was sound and I believe myself to have slightly lost the plot so I will conclude by starting over a bit here to mention some voices that are on the tip of my mind right now: Norma Waterson, Anne Briggs, Jeanne Lee, Blossom Dearie, Nick Jones, Dick Gaughan, Breda Keville, Loretta Lynn, Lata Mangeshkar! Singing just about anything and especially the music of RD Burman.

The Smithsonian release Music Of Indonesia, Vol.20: Indonesian Guitars which has some of the most beautiful singing I have ever heard.



What were some of the main challenges in your development as a singer/vocalist? Which practices, exercises, or experiences were most helpful in reaching your goals – were there also “harmful” ones?

I can not tell if smoking was good, bad or indifferent to my singing. But I can say that when I am not smoking I do enjoy singing much more.

Smoking really does create alterations with one’s relationship with air - perhaps for some and sometimes in a wonderful way! My relationship with singing prefers not to smoke. I do hope that I do not sound prude. I very much enjoy thinking that smoking is wonderful.

I do not have any exercises for singing although I have flirted with some at times but I just can not keep with it. A voice is a voice and you get what you get. That said I try to stay relatively healthy and do enjoy not bringing unwanted harm to myself or other things.

How do you see the relationship between harmony, rhythm and melody? Do you feel that honing your sense of rhythm and groove has an effect on your singing skills?

This a wonderful question and like a lot of wonderful questions one that is hard to answer right on the nose. To be clear up front, I have not really studied music in the academic sense, enough to even know where rhythm and melody begin and end. They seem so interweaved in each other that the two terms must speak to specific encounters within this interweave. That sounds right enough to me.

And I do not know much about harmony. I love a sweet chord or interval when I hear one, that much I can promise you. There is also inferred harmony, which Martin Carthy talks about more clearly than I can. I take inferred to mean that the harmonic substance of a musical moment need not be explicit. You hear this in a lot of modal musics but even harmony-machine musics like jazz, I am thinking of Monk’s wild chord and melody relationship - we can not really separate that from his insanely fierce rhythm - I think Thelonious Monk may have said to someone that a musicians job is to make the drummer sound good. How joyful!

In this way, and in a lot of ways, what makes up melodies and rhythms and harmonies is also made up of which it infers or just plain leaves out. Dancing to a good groove is a wonderful way to experience inferred musical content. And we hear this inferrence! We are dancing it.

Music is wild and wonderful. And far be it from me to prescribe any practice or relationship with music. But I do think that tending to our relationship with rhythm, and all that that could infer, could be quite pleasing.

What are the things you hear in a voice when listening to a vocalist? What moves you in the voices of other singers?

This is a another wonderful question that is hard to answer. Seems to be your thing today. I suppose that I may enjoy starting with the idea of opening up the space inbetween the voice and what I hear. That is to say that I think it a worthwhile and interesting experiment to separate the singer's intention, and  the singing material, and what I hear, although, quite obviously there can be a hefty amount of crossover at times.

So much of what lies within the act of loving is not knowing, not understanding, and not relying on knowledge and understanding to inhabit that love. I can not help but think of Betty Carter right now and some of the absolutely psychedelic encounters with her voice that I have had over the years. What is it that I hear? And what about that moves me? I just don’t know. I do not think that I can explain what I love about some things. Although, in the name of being a good guest, I can risk a little and give it a try. Who will it hurt?



I believe that many singers, and Betty Carter for sure, have a particular relationship or way with cadence. How one modulates a voice and closes a musical phrase (to use, what I believe to be, two ways of talking about cadence). I am moved by this. The encounter with a singular cadence is one of my listenings’ great pleasures.

Somewhat recently I have come across some great cadencers! Nick Hart who sings english trad ballads and swiss-based musician Leoni Leoni, who performs her own beautifully synth-swamped and groovy ballads.



How would you describe the physical sensation of singing? [Where do you feel the voice, do you have a visual sensation/representation, is there a sense of release or tension etc …]

It is hard to know from where to answer this question. Physical sensations, voice feeling, and visual sensations are a feral bunch! So let’s break it down:  describing one’s physical sensation of singing.

It may be easy to think that there are an infinite amount of sensations one can feel while singing and many of which may or may not come to our attention. In a live setting, with some kind of public address system and an audience (if all goes well) I sing through the microphone rather than into it. Or at least that is how it feels. I sing through and over the microphone into the back of the room. My voice wishes to discover what is out there and the microphone picks up some of the sound of that voice on its way.

Singing can feel like eating chocolate. It can resonate in the middle of your forehead. That is quite enjoyable. At other times one feels as if they can feel the air move from the ground, through the legs and middle and organs flying quickly through the chest and wah-wah machines of throat and mouth. This is also nothing if not an enjoyable sensation. Let’s keep this upbeat and leave the less desirable sensations alone. I wish to keep this upbeatfor now.

I am not aware of having had any plainly visual sensations in relation to singing, though I can look forward to such a time. I think that there is a sense of release of tension that one can encounter with singing as one can encounter with many breathing related activities. Singing is one way that air can be moved and one that I take a great pleasure in.