Tapestries of sound

Creating song stories for the modern world

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Annalisee Brasil and Zack Bainter, the two members of Sundsaga, are creating a new musical sound using old world instruments and a language never before spoken on earth.

“We definitely do this combination of using acoustic instruments and electric implementations to weave these tapestries of sound,” Brasil said. She is a Port Townsend resident who prefers her stage name of “Fox Syncrow.”

“He has a carbon fiber slide didgeridoo, which is really freaking cool. It is also one of two didges in the world that has a custom wood drop octave mouthpiece to fit it.”

The other didgeridoo is used by a musician in Holland that Brasil and Bainter collaborate with, she said.

The unique instrument enabled Bainter to change keys at any time, and to perform scales, Brasil said, adding it can be plugged into a loop station connected to a laptop, allowing for layering of sounds.

The bandmates enjoy the amalgamation of acoustic and digital technology, Brasil said.

“When we are playing the larger venues, you need to be amplified, so we take advantage of that and use it to create more modern sounds, more modern stories. But when we have the ability to just go acoustic, we keep it more intimate, more like you would imagine the stories of old.”

What did you say?

On top of the new sound the band has created, Brasil also sings in a language she herself created.

Since the words have no grammatical meaning to anyone other than Brasil, it provides the listener with a blank tapestry in which they can assign their own understanding to the words.

“The word is not filtering the feeling by anyone’s expectation of what this word connotes in their mind,” she said. “They have associations with the word blue versus cyan or anguish versus forlorn.”

Brasil said her intention is not to dictate to her audience how to thinks or feel.

“I am putting out what I am feeling and letting them piece it together. The words are just syllables that transport it.”

The language Brasil has created is on full display in the song “Viremaya,” which translates to English as “Lost Horizon.”

“It was a song I found when I was walking through the woods on a meditative walk. This was sort of the beginning of it because I wanted to describe these things that I felt, these worlds that I saw, these dreams, these images.”

Brasil attempted to capture the essence of her visions through painting and in original stories, but she said neither medium could do it justice.

So, Brasil turned to music.

“It expresses exactly what I want,” she said. “It was a lament. The character had experienced the loss of her homeworld, so it starts as this sorrowful lament. Depending on the energy of the audience, my energy, everything, it changes.”

Sometimes the lament will stay sad and mournful and pure in that essence, Brasil said, while at others it becomes angry and vengeful.

“Sometimes it is majestic, glorious —remembering what once was and I carry this with me wherever I go. It is never lost.”

After hearing the original language for the first time, Bainter said he was astounded by its power.

“I think it is amazing. I am excited for her to be doing more work on that fictional world from which we are bringing a lot of our songs from. I want to be able to transcribe the language so I can add some lyrics into it myself.”

Raw emotions

Sundsaga draws on the feelings of the listener to convey deeper meaning, Bainter said.

“We are an affect driven performance,” he said. “For the most part, I would say it is an esoteric sound that we have going on, very much layered. With that language she has going, obviously no one understands it because she made it up.”

Despite that, the audience seems to correctly interpret the mood of the lyrics, Bainter said.

“We noticed that people often catch on to it and react in a way that we are trying to convey, although all I am doing is musically yelling through my instrument and Fox is singing in a language that nobody understands,” Bainter said.

Brasil said the positive reactions from her audiences have been highly enjoyable.

“People are sort of dumbfounded by it. I am bashful about it and so happy,” she said.

Bainter said evoking emotional response is a very special experience.

“It is not often that you can show some wild and gnarly new music in front of people they haven’t heard before with words they don’t understand and have people still react well to it and want to hear more of it,” he said.

A new oral tradition

A self-described “mythology geek,” Brasil said she has been obsessed with ancient myths since the time she first could interpret the written word.

“It still informs some of my music,” she said. “In fact, I stole one from Homer’s ‘Hymn to the Goddess Selene.’ That being said, myths were life’s blood and currency back then. Oral traditions were everything.”

Sadly, those old stories are now gone, Brasil said.

“There were songs for everything, for sewing, for hunting, for love, for birth for death,” she said. “Some of those things we can’t have songs for anymore. Some things we have now, we didn’t have songs for then. It is up to us to create new songs and new stories, and we can use old ideas but we have to keep going.”

Brasil wants to create a soundtrack based on the old traditions for the modern age.

“There is something to be learned from them,” she said. “A story that doesn’t make you laugh or cry isn’t really a story you should be living your life by. You should find the stories that matter. That is sort of the thing of creating new mythology. It is a soul food.”

Creating stories through song was what led to the name Sundsaga, which translates into “sound story,” Brasil said.

Renaissance woman

Brasil, a native of Longview, Texas, was born with an IQ that places her in the top 0.1 percent of the population, according to an article about her in Time Magazine.

The public school system in Longview didn’t have the resources to engage Brasil, who was years ahead of similarly aged students, so she had to be homeschooled for a time. Later, she attended the Davidson Academy in Reno, Nevada, a school for profoundly gifted students founded in 2006.

At the school, Brasil studied opera and classical piano.

“When I was 11 and 12, I had already sung with the East Texas Opera Chorus,” Brasil said. “Classical piano and opera were my first two loves. I studied those for a very long time until I was told I was too young to pursue opera.”

In response, Brasil decided to learn how to play several musical instruments.

“I fought them for a long time, and finally I said, ‘Fine. I will just learn every other instrument and genre of music there is.’ I quickly ended up playing drum kit in jazz band. I learned how to play didgeridoo, bass guitar, marimba, timpani. I tried violin. Found out I hated it.”

Brasil decided that exploring all of the musical instruments she could before graduating high school and being accepted as a sophomore at the University of Washington at the age of 16 was the best course of action.

“I ended up joining a rock band and found a rougher edge to my voice that led to eventually being in a heavy metal band,” she said. “I was in another group that did a lot of renaissance fairs and festival circuits and it was really fun. We did a lot of Celtic rock and sea shanties. It got me out of my shell and to know more people.”

Still, the bands weren’t fulfilling Brasil’s innate creative desire, she said.

“There was something deep inside me that I wanted to get out. There is that music I felt I needed to express.”

Musical chemistry

When she met Bainter, Brasil for the first time felt she had found a kindred musical spirit.

The chemistry was immediate, she said.

“We were attending this festival out here in Seattle, and both of us had been told of one another by a mutual friends, but hadn’t met,” Bainter said. “I happened to have an instrument with me, one of my compact didgeridoos, and her being a vocalist and a guitarist, she hers with her busking. We met up in the lobby, sort of collided, and our friend just happened to be there as well.”

They stated playing and the chemistry was immediate, Brasil said.

“Before 10 minutes had gone by, we had festival organizers asking for our booking information so they could get us,” Bainter said. “That is how Sundsaga got started, that fluke meeting. Every show that we played since then has carried that same sort of energy where we just sort of play off the energy of the space, off each other and make something out of it. It is very unique. I have played in a couple of different bands, but I have never experienced this type of a vibe before.”