Mira'nda sings soulful sounds
By Adrian Smith and Lise Aumeunier
JAKARTA (JP): In a world that tends to pigeon-hole musical artists, Mira'nda's music proves something of an anomaly.
The natural ease and conviction with which she uninhibitedly expresses herself is inspiration to all those who feel that their individuality can only come to nothing in today's seemingly technocratic world. This refreshing musical approach came across at her recent concert held as part of JakArt at Lasalle College.
The Australian self-styled musical artist combines her own strong passionate vocals with guitar. This, you may think, sounds pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, but her vocal range and combination of varying vocal techniques, from humming, singing, yodeling (for want of a better word) through to chanting, is impressive and seemingly unrestricted. The closest comparisons that came to mind were Alannis Morrisette and P.J. Harvey, though even they, it has to be said, occupy radically different musical realms.
Not content with only playing a guitar in a horizontal position, she extended the spectrum of sounds normally associated with an accompanying guitar by moving the instrument to an upright position and dabbing the strings with what looked like a giant cotton earbud to produce a rich resonant sound, followed soon after in contrast by scratchy more dissonant sounds produced by a small bow.
When asked of her musical influences, rather than name particular figures she referred to her childhood and the desert landscapes that surrounded her in southern Australia to which she still returns for inspiration.
"I don't draw inspiration from anyone in particular, my creations are borne from my experience of the world, of everything that I have so far encountered," she said.
Nature and the experience of "being" are not only evident in her lyrics, but also in the symbolic content of the design creations that adorn her debut album, So Bravely Human, which were projected onto a white fabric screen as an accompanying slide-show. This provided rich, earthy visual color to her soulful music. By and large, they were photographic close-ups of living organisms and her own arrangements of various natural items with slogans that accompanied her lyrics. One that comes to mind was 'spontaneously free'.
She opened and closed the hour-long concert by standing in front of the screen wearing a white costume that absorbed the projected image, displaying her own voice against prerecorded backing vocals and twisting her body in different movements in accordance with the music. Throughout the rest of the set she remained seated and played songs from her current album, as well as the one she is working on at the moment (due to be released sometime at he end of 2001 or early 2002), pausing briefly between each song to talk playfully with the responsive audience.
The venue itself proved an unusual yet interesting choice. The college is located on the fifth floor of Mal Ambassador on Jl. Casablanca, which has all the hustle and bustle of local shopping malls on the lower floors, but appears progressively more sparse and vacant on the upper storeys.
Mira'nda's textural music clearly reflects the voice of someone who is still in the process of exploring different ways of expressing herself.
"I feel I have evolved from someone who began by taking an intellectual, philosophical approach to music to one that is producing music from the heart. I'm interested now in popularizing music that was formerly considered peripheral."
Her rise from penumbra to prominence began when she was awarded the 1999 Dolphin Awards for Best Female Vocal and Best Album of the Year in Australia and she has since then performed around the world, from intimate theaters to huge stadiums, to much acclaim.
The title of her only album to date perhaps indicates the struggle she has had to endure to evade musical conventions and classifications to retain her own individual voice. It undoubtedly comes across as all the more powerful for it.