ART PAPERS magazine,
Vol. 23.2, March/April 1999.

P1

Back home in Atlanta after a five-week recording stint in Israel, the demure diva of art-rock talks with Editor Michael Pittari. Like the strange, shifting cast of self-invented characters who manifest themselves in her evocative explorations into art and music, Jarboe's life-journey through the different worlds of her own history has produced a complex range of emotive material bound up into one mind and body. Although her work has been well documented in music magazines, and, perhaps most thoroughly, in Andrea Juno's seminal 1996 book, Angry Women in Rock, her exposure within the art world has been long overdue. As both an "artist working in sound," as she refers to herself, and as performer of mesmerizing capabilities, Jarboe inhabits the nebulous vacancy between music, performance, and installation.

Raised throughout the Deep South, Jarboe was exposed early-on to the myriad and mysterious rituals of life. Her father, an FBI agent, changed personas regularly as he moved the family to the different locations he was investigating undercover; of particular note were the tent revivals that he took the four-year-old Jarboe to in rural Mississippi, forcing her to confront her fears through snake-handling rituals. From the same age her father also taught her music, enrolling Jarboe in formal singing classes and church choirs. But this same man, who instilled such gifts in his daughter, also caused adolescent paranoia in her by monitoring her whereabouts and taping her phone calls, keeping them, along with his FBI surveillance tapes, locked in a desk drawer which she only discovered after his death many years later. Her mother, a devout Catholic, influenced Jarboe's love of ritual and bestowed upon her both a spiritual and intellectual interest in religion.

Working her way through college as a lounge singer, Jarboe had a go at the music business, singing commercial demos-even a Coca-Cola jingle-and trying to enter into the male-dominated rock industry that she "so desperately" wanted to be a part of. Finding all the doors closed, so to speak, Jarboe entered a dark period of her life that she terms "the ultimate rebellion" against her family. Fueled by a drug habit she had battled with since her teenage years, she became a sex-worker in the rock music industry, selling her body to megalomaniac stars of the late-'70s engaged in sadistic games of power and misogynism. She came clean after a few years, however, simultaneously developing a dual life as both an upwardly mobile young wife to a career-oriented Atlanta corporate systems analyst and as a regular on the city's emerging art and performance scene. The latter change, in particular, had the most profound effect upon her; inspired by the experimental music and noise featured on Georgia Tech's legendary radio station, WREK, Jarboe began performing her music for the first time, strapping contact microphones to her neck and chest and distorting her voice through "different gadgets and delays."

As if that wasn't enough, the biggest change in Jarboe's life was still to come. In 1983, upon hearing Filth, the second record by a ferociously loud New York art-rock group called Swans, she felt a "voracious, animalistic side" emerge from her personality and was compelled to "contact" the group. Under false pretenses (pretending to write for an art magazine!), Jarboe interviewed Swans founder and creative force, Michael Gira. Her attraction to Swans' pummeling musical intensity and the creative energy of the East Village, where she met members of Sonic Youth and her long-time friend, Lydia Lunch, was overpowering; within the next year she sold the majority of her belongings, divorced her husband, moved to New York, and, most prophetically, persuaded Gira to let her join Swans.