"Composer and sound artist Micaela Tobin wields her soprano voice against the confines of convention, specializing in experimental and contemporary realms of opera and noise. From her Los Angeles homebase, Micaela focuses on building connections between the physical voice and one’s 'inner' voice as a means of empowerment, challenging colonial stories and systems. Integrating voice with electronics, ritualized gesture and amplified object-symbolism, she weaves dynamic music that is at once alluring and demanding. // With her primary project, White Boy Scream, Micaela dissects her operatic and extended vocal techniques through hardware, oscillating between extreme textures of noise, drone, and sound walls. Here, she explores her diasporic identity as a first-generation Filipina-American. Her most recent full length album BAKUNAWA (Deathbomb Arc, 2020) includes elements of sonic ritual, ancient myth, and ancestral memory. Of the album, The New Yorker asserts, 'Opera would do well to pay attention.'"
see also her REMAINS (2018 cassette, 2023 vinyl reissue) and Tent Music (2023, w/ Joshua Hill)
Tent Music: "Playing at times like a more brutal, fractured version of Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet’s 2018 song cycle, Landfall while careening from bone-rattling fuzzed-out violin drones that wouldn’t be out of place on Stephen O’Malley’s Cylene to glorious psychedelic pop songs, Tent Music centers intuition to the point of channeling spirits-cum-archetypes. Tobin’s avant-operatic background, including work with Pulitzer Prize winner Raven Chacon, and her celebrated work as White Boy Scream certainly serve as reference points for this work, but the circumstances surrounding Tent Music set it apart from that work, as from the rest of earthly existence. It is in no small sense ritual music in the footsteps of Coil, perhaps automatic music, in the spirit of Austin Osman Spare’s automatic drawing."
see also Songs of the Bakunawa, a "series of ritual performances" ("Sonic Rituals for Decolonizing the Ancestral Voice")
https://www.micaelatobin.com/almostsongs