On paper, there is little overlap between the artistic worlds of Los Angeles based musicians Micaela Tobin and Joshua Hill. Tobin is a composer and opera singer best known for the avant garde pieces and noise experiments she makes as White Boy Scream. Hill is a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and composer whose folk rock miniatures and intimate conceptual works form an overarching, diaristic narrative. But the beauty of art is in its uncertainties and the unexpected outcomes it can bring forth.

In June 2021, Tobin and Hill entered a tent together and recorded material that contained fragments of their individual aesthetics, but also let loose an overarching flow that felt more than just the sum of its parts. Over the next year and a half, Hill refined and developed the recordings until they became the tracks heard on Tent Music. While significantly augmented, the music’s final form retained all of the heavy ambience and shimmering aura of two hot, heavy nights “amidst the pine trees, under a smokey moon” in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Antonio Poscic: How did the two of you first meet? According to the press release, the story begins with Micaela visiting Joshua’s parents’ house in northern Arizona, but I’m guessing Micaela didn’t just set up camp in the yard of a complete stranger?

Micaela Tobin: That would be the better story, though! We actually met at REDCAT. It’s a big contemporary theatre, music and performance space in Los Angeles. I think it was January of 2020 when I was doing a show there and Josh was working sound. There was a ukulele in the show, so I walked on stage and I heard this person – someone that was not the performer – playing the ukulele, doing this insane solo. I was like, who the hell is playing the ukulele like that?! Turns out it was Josh testing the mic, the pickup on the instrument, and I just had to go and say hi.

Afterwards you stayed in touch through the pandemic, but did you collaborate in any way before Tent Music?

Joshua Hill: No, the first music we ever made together was side A of Tent Music. We might have eaten some Thai food once before together and I played some violin at Micaela and she was like “I don't know about this”. But there was something about not being in LA that allowed us to actually feel whatever it was we needed to. It was just the right moment. We were both doing different kinds of residencies or projects around that time. I was up in Colorado and Micaela was on her way to Albuquerque. We hung out for a few days before we went our separate ways. Then when we were texting, while we were in our different spots, we just thought of doing a recording in the tent. It came spontaneously from there. I ran an extension cable from my parents’ house and then the recording happened on two separate nights. Side A was the first night and side B was the second night.

Did you prepare any material in advance of the recording or was everything entirely improvised?

Joshua: Literally what you hear when Micaela is coughing and getting started at the beginning of the album is actually how the whole thing started.

Micaela: I had a notebook with me, with a little bit of lyrics or journal entries in it. It’s a notebook that I always keep on me, so I used some of those words as jumping off material. But the words as you hear them when they pour out of me are really straight streams of consciousness.

I find it interesting that despite the session being spontaneous, there’s a certain sense of structure to the music, an idea of a purposeful journey. How do you feel about it when you listen back to it now?

Joshua: I only had two instruments when I was playing with Micaela. I had a violin and a noisy synth. Micaela delivered these very complete, complex songs, and then it was a matter of me catching up. It took me a year and a half to play catch up to the amazing music Micaela created. One of my favourite musicians is the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, and there's just something about Micaela that reminds me of her, her soprano and powerful voice and having this army of violins behind her. I’ve always dreamt of being the orchestral leader behind a singer like that. So what we did was a very modern way of replicating that experience. It’s maybe not the most sustainable process because it was a lot of work. We’re still feeling out what's the practical way of even performing this music live. We can’t replicate the album without 30 people and then I also have to start a cult for six to eight months to teach them how to play my music or Micaela’s music – we need an orchestra, basically.

Micaela: With my background in opera and classical music from a very young age, I lean naturally into those melodies and structures. I grew up singing in choirs, too, so with all of that in the background of my brain, when I go to improvise I think it comes out in a really great way, specifically with Joshua. It’s just the mixture of who we are as musicians. It was also a feeling in these improvisation sessions that was coming through us and not from us. When I first listened back to the recordings of my voice, I heard myself using colours and textures that I hadn't previously used, even though I have a lot of experience with extended techniques and whatnot. That was something really beautiful and exciting to me about the project, especially once Josh started to add all of these elements and made the music bloom into itself the way that we had never even imagined. I’m really grateful to be a part of it. I mean, I got to show up for two nights and then Josh drove himself to the brink for the next year and a half making a really gorgeous record out of it. I think a beautiful thing about this project is the ritual process and spontaneity that happened in that initial recording session and the freedom that I feel and the ease to just kind of channel and improvise with Joshua. The next step is figuring out if we reverse engineer this and how we’re going to play it live, which is where we’re at. We’re potentially going to be doing a show at the end of September to celebrate the album coming up.

There’s also a strong emotional component felt in the music. Was what you recorded influenced by things that were going on around you at the time, such as summer wildfires, the epidemic isolation and Josh’s father struggling with dementia?

Micaela: I think so, for sure. The reason we set up the tent was because I’ve had this tent for years and Josh said he needed a little space from being cramped up in the house with his family. So I suggested he should live in it for the summer in his backyard. It could be his safe space and this place he could exist in. Then this beautiful music happened in it. I was heading to Albuquerque because I had gone through a rough period, some stuff had happened in LA and I needed to get out of town. My friend Raven Chacon hooked me up with house sitting for a friend of his in Albuquerque so I ended up going out there for a couple weeks and I also recorded with him and another friend. Then it culminated in the Tent Music recording. For me that whole trip was like there was something in the air and it was a really special, special time.

Joshua: I think our experience is encapsulated in the recording on an imaginary level and documentary level. This is most clear at the beginning of track two, “False Star”. You can hear Micaela and me talking about how my dad’s in the backyard honouring the four directions. I’ve used that recording in some of my solo work and we loosely built a story around this travelling figure. On one level it’s me and on another level it’s perhaps my father. It also ties in with the whole thing of memory, dementia and fantasy – those are all part of the same conversation. It was this very simple act of us being in a tent and then it turned into something otherworldly, all through very practical sweat equity. But it was also a process, it was a hard record to work on. Some of those tracks are really violent, especially “Closer”. I was recording a lot of it in a shed later on in Glendale and I remember laying on the floor of this concrete shed after each take just because it was so emotionally intense. I think there’s some processing and grieving through that. The fact that my friend was there and that Micaela’s performance was so, so moving, even though the finish line was so far away, it just kept me inspired.

How does the album fit with the rest of your works or even in the story of your personal relationship?

Joshua: I’m not sure how Tent is part of my mythological landscape, but I think music ends up being these communal portals that we can all bask in. That’s all ongoing and Tent is part of that simply because it's our lives. It's interesting how even between the different nights I hear side B as being a very Micaela side – there’s just something to what she's singing about that is very resonant in her personal work – and then my philosophies or energy feels more alive in the first night. I don't know if that was intentional, but it's just kind of this balance between the two of us. “Fire In My Hands” starts with a violin melody that has very personal significance for me. I call it the melody of my family. The only reason I started playing it is because Micaela started singing it in the track before. If you listen to the raw recordings, it’s just Micaela singing and then I keep a beat. There is a very ritualistic quality of having a person making the beat and someone singing over. Spiritual practice is very important to both of us and that’s always been a way that we’ve connected.

Micaela: And we’re both drama queens! Returning to opera, there’s always a part of me that’s channelling Dido [from Dido And Aeneas] or any of the other tragic soprano figures that I grew up embodying and trying to reach those high notes. So now when I improvise, it's like I can be any one of them I want because I'm in control of my instrument and my body and my artistic narrative. I’m going to channel Dido. I’m going to channel Aida. I'm going to channel all of them, in a way.

Tent Music also feels like a transformative experience. Has it influenced the music you’ve made since?

Micaela Tobin: I don’t want to sound cliched, but that experience was very healing for me. I was processing a lot of stuff. I almost fainted the second night. We blame it on the wine and the altitude, but that experience took a lot out of me there, and then it took a lot out of Josh in the year and a half after. It has influenced for the better my art making practice since. In the last opera I did with the musicians I worked with, there were definitely more elements of improvisation and trust. I think what Tent Music has taught me is that if you create the right container, beautiful things will happen. With the opera, I definitely followed suit in trusting my own abilities as an improvisor and then the folks that I was with. Let me set up the tent, the container, and then throw everyone in it and let’s see what happens.

There is also a book of illustrations that accompanies the music?

Micaela: Yes, illustrated by Garek Druss. He is an amazing electronic experimental musician, illustrator and very spiritual person. We basically gave him semi-final mixes and told him to listen to each track and draw an accompanying sigil and illustration with each track. It adds this whole other dimension to the experience that we felt was a way to express and channel or capture the element that we had there and give the audience, our listeners, a bit more through this book.

Joshua: We told him the general story. Imagine that there’s this figure who’s wandering to a mountain and meeting some scary cosmic queen and she devours him – there's a loose internal narrative that we found through discovering what the record was like. It became a very in-depth collaboration naturally and Garek just really understood the language of the record.

Tent Music is released by Whited Sepulchre on 25 August. Read Antonio Poscic’s review of the album in The Wire 475. The magazine is also available to read online with a subscription.