Name: VAN TASTIK
Nationality: American
Occupation: One man band
Current release: VAN TASTIK's Church of the Fallen Reverend is out now.
Vocal music recommendations:
"My Wild Love" - The Doors
Negro Prison Blues by Alan Lomax Jr (I really dislike that name but it is the only way you’ll find the album and it reminds all us Americans of a past we ought not forget)
Also
"Conversation with Death (Oh Death)" - Berzilla Wallin
"I am a poor Pilgrim of Sorrow" - Old Regular Baptists
Both from the Classic Mountains Songs Album by Smithsonian Folkways

If you enjoyed this VAN TASTIK interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud.



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?

Dang ... I quite honestly couldn’t tell you when I stated singing! I think it was unconscious. I was surrounded by it from day 1.

My mother worked for a big outdoor theatre back in my younger days called The Wolf Trap in the greater D.C area (technically VA I guess). My father sang me to sleep every night he could but he was on the road a lot. My grandmother played piano in church and at home and sang in every memory I have of her. She sang in that old fashioned jazzy kind of style that you hear a lot in old Blues and Jazz recordings.

You can hear that jazzy influence in my song “Paranoia (They Hate You).”



Personally I think the first thing I ever sang was probably Disney or Elvis. Both of which were big in my house. Ha.

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

I think they differ. In fact, I think that each instrument has an expressive power in its own right. As in it inspires you to write differently or express different emotions or express them in different ways. Of course, we read more easily into singing because it is so primeval and so natural to us as humans but each instrument also allows you to express yourself differently. Since I operate as a one-person-band I feel well placed to say this.

Sometimes when I jam with myself alone at home with the guitar or some other of my string instruments (Mandolin, Appalachian Dulcimer, Banjo and even with my Bass) I come up with these sorts of “ragas” - to utilise the South Asian terminology - where I get into this incredibly hypnotic meditational state. You can hear me play something of that “raga” style in my song “Fire” and “Tired Journey” one of which is inspired from Appalachian Folk and the other from Piedmont style Blues.



This, I find hard to do on keys instruments because I lack the sense of dynamics that I find with string instruments and also which I feel I miss with wind instruments (or monophonic instruments). With the human voice the variety of sounds and dynamics and even styles in which one can sing is so great that I honestly don’t think anything can compare.

And perhaps most importantly ANYONE can sing even those who say they can’t if you were to catch ‘em in the shower I’m sure you’d find they’re just as susceptible to the singing bug as we all are and then it’s much more a question of confidence. (That and there’ve also been medical research papers into this that have concluded that every human has the capacity to sing and that it then fall on training and practice and so on)

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

I am inspired by everything I see and hear. I ABSOLUTELY LOVE drone singing. Stuff like Georgian Choirs, Bulgarian polyphonic singing, Native American powwow singing and - I think - quite obviously, if you listen to the last track on my current album, “Don’t Leave Me for Valentine’s Day,” American Folk especially Work Songs, Field Hollers and Spirituals and Gospel.



I also have a soft spot for Flamenco - the real stuff, the old stuff although a modern artist like Rosalia has brought the old rawer style of flamenco back with her current fame and her first album or two.



I think mainly I draw from American lore and cultural styles and traditions but then the US is made out of this incredible potluck of cultures that have sort of indiscriminately been mashed up together to form our cultural heritage.

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?

Learning to project my voice and finding out that I could control my stress by using my holler voice. I figured out thanks to singing in school and church gospel choirs and shouting for heavy metal bands that I could be quite loud and even extend my singing into higher ranges when I projected my voice into what I like to call my “hollering”. You hear that quite well in “Drag Me to Hell” …



At the end of the second verse I reach a D4 which you don’t expect from your average baritone (although in head voice I can still go up to countertenor territory just about up to C5 and all the way down to an E1 when I sing more quietly).

I always felt I couldn’t quite hold a note the way I wanted to and then realised it was largely because of stage fright or even self-inflicted pressure. So realising I could channel that into my loud voice and get all that energy out allows me to somehow gain greater control with the volume but also then empty my voice for quieter songs after I’ve shaken off some of that bad juju. I also like to practice other styles of singing like Opera and even some tiny bit of Tuvan Throat Singing.

When I was young I had a lot of problems with my ears, nose and throat as a whole leading me to acute and chronic otitis which lead me to having hearing and balance issue when I was young and eventually to getting my adenoids removed. But I often still struggle with my throat and ears and nose so I have to carefully maintain and cultivate my throat, nose and ear health with frequent teas, a lot of honey, lemons, ginger, even raw onions and garlic and of course vaporub inhalations and salt water gargling.

Not very “rock’n’roll” but I care about my health … hahaha what can I say? I’m a grandpa inside.

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?

ABSOLUTELY if you listen to anything else but classical, chamber music or opera you cannot contest that rhythm is an essential part of singing.

I gravitated toward Blues for that very reason.

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

I like to hear singers’ emotions when they perform and that often translates to a certain amount of vocal fry - whether because of legitimate strain or stylistic - and dynamics.

You can actually hear the genuine strain in my first demo of "Drag Me to Hell" (which is retitled “DMTH” to not conflict with my other recordings of the song). The strain is painfully genuine to me still today because I was working 16 hour days at that point and was under a lot of stress during the recordings from the people I was recording with who were trying to steer the recordings in a direction I didn’t like and making my life extra difficult.



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 …]

For me, it’s a release, like a deep long sigh. It sometimes feels like I'm holding my breath for weeks when I don’t have a concert for a while. Singing is definitely a sense of relief for me.

Listen to my song “Ain’t Got Nothin’ on my Father” to hear the release in my voice. I’m really shouting that at the top of my lungs.



What kind of musical settings and situations do you think are ideal for your own voice?

Old buildings with a nice amount of reverb. The forest. By a fire (although I always find the smoke a little painful to the throat).

Speaking of which listen to my song called “Fire”. ha.

We have a speaking voice and a singing voice. Do these feel like they are natural extensions of each other, ends on a spectrum or different in kind?

They are for me and they do. You can hear that in my song “Death Come and Get Me” where my talking voice blends seamlessly with my singing.



From whispers to screams, from different colours to dynamics, what are the potentials and limits of your voice? How much of your vocal performance can and do you want to control?

Limits of my voice are being quiet. When I am I lose some precision in my notes or at least I feel like I do but I’m learning to love my quiet voice as years go by. And other limitation is that I’m no modern Tenor style so even I can reach fairly high in chest and a smidge higher in head voices I can’t maintain that on long periods of time.

I find that with my ear, nose, throat problems as well I struggle to scream or reach vocal fry in a sustainable way. And of course as mentioned before my need to maintain my throat and nose and ears to keep my voice in good working order.

When you're writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text? Does it need to feel and sound “good” or “right” to sing certain words? What's your perspective in this regard of singing someone else's songs versus your own?

I actually tend to find the melody first both with the instruments and the singing and then fit the lyrics to that melody. My song “Hangman” is a great example of that



Strain is a particularly serious issue for many vocalists. How do you take care of your voice? Are the recipes or techniques to get a damaged voice back in shape?

Well I’ve mentioned it a few times now. Getting ahead of myself is part of the job when you’re a one man band.

Lots of salt water gargling. Nice herbal teas. Vick’s Vaporub inhalations. Singing in a hot steamy shower. Protecting my ears, nose and throat when I sleep or when it starts to get cold out. Maaaaybe every so often some kind of Strong Spirit (Whiskey or Rum are favorites) occasionally helps to cauterise or disinfect the throat if I feel a sore throat coming on or before a gig for some “Dutch courage”. Mostly Thai style ginger, lemon and honey infusion tea.

And you’re gonna hate me but eating raw onions like an apple and same with garlic -although in tiny nibbles and with a full stomach - cause garlic will MESS. YOU. UP man.

How has technology, such as autotune or effect processing, impacted singing? Has it been a concrete influence on your own approach?

Personally I don’t use this. Ever. I haven’t had a single song that was in any way pitch corrected. I like that rawness. That authenticity. With a lot of pitch correction you lose that. Dynamics go out the window … and in my opinion… so does credibility as an artist.

Except for T-Pain. That guys’ NPR Tiny Desk wowed me out of my chair. I had no idea he could sing so smoothly or at all in fact haha what with his use of autotune being so heavy in all of his records.



For recording engineers, the human voice remains a tricky element to capture. What, from your perspective, makes voices sound great on record and in a live setting?

On record, still after all this time I don’t think we’ve got it. When people come to my live shows or see me busk on the streets every so often they are dumbstruck usually with how much control and volume I have and how much they feel that deep in their heart and souls.

I think my debut album does a pretty good job of capturing my voice but many of my fans and those who’ve seen me live say it doesn’t capture my voice or my power as a one person band in general.

On a side note, I really to use old fashioned ribbon microphones and microphones with their own amplifiers for production reasons and stylistically I feel they captured my voice better than the modern mics.

Motherese may have been the origin of music, and singing is possibly the earliest form of musical expression, and culture in general. How connected is the human voice to your own sense of wellbeing, your creativity, and society as a whole?

Woah! This one’s deep. Damn. Where do I start? Yeaaaah? Nooo? Ish…

I don’t think about these things consciously. It might sound a little pretentious or overly esoteric but my art just comes out of me and I’m sort of just a conduit. I think it’s an artist’s role to reflect greater society. I think all art is a mirror to society and to ourselves as artists.

Sometimes that mirror shows us stuff we don’t wanna see and sometimes it does. I think the most insightful artists can show us the aspects we refuse to see or acknowledge in a way that makes it possible for us to accept and acknowledge them and the most prolific can show us all sides because they have taken us through their life journey and therefore presented us with many various moods and styles and approaches to this “mirror”.

In a greater sense the voice is of crucial importance in the sense that not enough people communicate as much as they should their intentions, their feelings, their experiences etc but also many people do not communicate candidly enough - at very least with those close to them.

If we all communicated and clarified our thoughts and feelings and emotions a little more, then I believe, many couples would be closer together, marriages saved, wars kept at bay, children would grow up in safe environments and so on.

Communication is education and how precisely and in-depth we can communicate as humans is the very core of what makes our species stand out from all other life forms on our planet.