I haven’t written articles for my website in a while. And after almost a year of being dormant, lightning struck twice, and I decided to stretch my fingers.

The reason was that I finally decided to actually sing in my tracks. Until recently, my spoken vocals completely dominated my tracks. It’s not that I’m afraid or that I can’t sing at all, but I just don’t like my singing voice. I’ve been planning to start and given up on this idea many times. Yes, I sang, recorded it, and even tried to mix with my music, but in the end, I deleted the vocals and recorded it in a spoken style. Ofc, I didn’t just do monotone speaking; my spoken vocals were dynamic, rhythmic, and even melodic to some extent. I tried to weave the vocals into the music as organically as possible, and I succeeded. Some people even liked it, and I did too. But when there’s a clear vocal melody that needs to be sung, you can’t replace it with spoken vocals. You just lose like 90% of the original idea.

When my family and I left Australia and came to Eastern Europe, I saw all the war chaos going on here, my lifestyle changed a bit, and I thought:

=Maybe, just maybe, I should give it a try after all?=

Then there was that track - =Charging of Messalina=, which had a rather simple, yet clear and alluring vocal line. I was consumed by such a strong desire to sing it... It was comparable to sexual arousal... And I tried. When I listened to what I had recorded, I didn’t experience any gag reflexes. Yes, it wasn’t perfect, it was far from perfect, and there were mistakes in the notes, but after mixing the recording and listening to it a few more times, I realized that my singing vocals fit this music. Fit quite well. You know, sometimes the vocals or the voice itself don’t match the music; they don’t sound organic, like they belong together, and when listening to such a mix, unpleasant sensations arise. But that wasn’t my case. That’s when I finally decided that I would work in this direction and continue experimenting.

In the first song, Charging of Messalina, I used auto tune to correct wrong notes, because I got too tired of re-singing it on and on. But when I started working on the next track =The Power of Entrancing= , I set myself the goal of singing in a way that would allow me to do without auto tune. Because this song was very important to me. The chorus, these words:

We are the greatest
We're moonblooded
There's no match among you all

Well, how could I allow myself to sing it with mistakes? That’s why I got down to it seriously and, using some psychosomatic techniques, managed to overcome all mistakes in singing and recorded melodically correct vocals. Yes, verses got less of my attention, but I got away without auto-tune here as well. So when I finished working on the vocals for this song, I was absolutely satisfied. I guess that’s why my song even appealed to those who have never liked my music - my hubby.

The next song, =Bella Be My Lover= was very easy to perform. So I did it quick and liked the result. Yes, I still use singing vocals along with spoken, because I like both and well I need a lot of vocals to tell my story in as much details as I can afford, but maybe in my next album I’ll try to completely stop using spoken stuff in favour of singing.

So now that 3 more songs left in my current album, =Six Years in Hell=, I’ll definitely be singing in two of them: =Mary, I'll Save You= and =Torquay 1905=. The third song, =Hetep Sebu (The Lesser Ritual of Luck)= is going to be a bonus track in Bandcamp's version of my album, and I plan to use the ritual spells in Ancient Egyptian there as they are pronounced, i.e. spoken. Looking ahead a bit, I’ll say that there won’t be a publicly available translation for that bonus song. It will be available as a text file only for those who buy the entire album. This is due to the fact that the lyrics depict extremely cruel scenes, and not intended for public access.

So all that’s left to say now is… If you haven’t listened to the tracks with my singing vocals yet, be sure to do so. My music will sound different to you, and you’ll definitely like it.

Good Luck!