Breadwoman returns to plant another seed
Experimental artist Anna Homler’s creation will sing for first time since ’80s.
Last year, New York experimental record label RVNG Intl. reissued a curious album of 1980s compositions called “Breadwoman and Other Tales.”
Created by Los Angeles musician and performance artist Anna Homler, Breadwoman sang in her own language, a mix of syllabic utterances that sounded like some ancient tongue.
This character — or creature — wore as a mask a gigantic loaf of bread with carved-out eye and mouth holes, and a head scarf and tattered clothing that suggested Breadwoman was a decrepit beggar.
Homler was a young performer at the time, she says on the phone from her Los Angeles home, where she is preparing to rehearse for Breadwoman’s first performance since the early ’80s. It will occur at the Santa Monica Public Library on Thursday.
Says Homler, “In 1982, I put a loaf of sourdough bread on my head and went to the farmers market. There was a space in my world to do that, so I did.”
That first Breadwoman appearance occurred in Westwood, and the reaction surprised Homler.
“People seemed to know me. I mean, I was a woman in street clothes with a bread mask, so you couldn’t see my face — you just saw the bread. People would go, ‘Breadwoman!’ Or ‘Breadlady!’ They recognized me, and I felt I had touched upon an archetype.”
Originally issued as a cassette, the 2016 vinyl and CD reissue of “Breadwoman and Other Tales” earned nearly universal acclaim in the experimental music world, both for Homler’s vocal approach and the synthesized sounds and tape manipulations behind her, crafted by the late electroacoustic musician Steve Moshier.
The recordings are striking and at various times suggest artists including Icelandic musician Bjork, the New York voice artist Meredith Monk and the late Arthur Russell’s extended meditations.
“Gu She Na Di,” for example, opens with a throbbing synthesizer tone before Homler’s Breadwoman begins singing. What comes out sounds like a language, with emotive consonants and vowels strung together and a conversational depth.
Homler developed the language during commutes.
“I would drive in my car, and these chants would happen. The language felt very comfortable and natural to me,” she says, adding that “the sounds I was making with my mouth somehow tasted delicious.”
She recorded them onto cassette and pitched a collaboration to her friend Moshier, who at the time was working with what she describes as an “urban chamber group” called the Cartesian Reunion Memorial Orchestra. Moshier died in 2016.
Accompanying Homler will be experimental musician and clarinetist Jorge Martin, who has been working on re-creating tones that Moshier improvised decades ago.
“Steve said he couldn’t duplicate the music,” Homler explains. “Jorge is doing what Steve couldn’t do.”
Martin, who focuses mostly on acoustic-based sounds, says: “My brain is just trying to figure these things out. So I’m trying to use a modular synth to recreate some of the music.”
Homler stressed that parts of Thursday’s set would be improvised, calling it, with a laugh, “bread with seeds — it’s going to be a whole-grain performance.”
Asked whether she’d secured her loaves yet, Homler chuckles. Bemoaning the loss of a Venice bakery where she could “go get my bread heads — they had the perfect size for my head,” Homler says she hadn’t yet bought the bread, which will be worn by dancer Maya Gingery.
The renewed interest in Breadwoman has not only shocked Homler, but it’s been a moving return of a character she thought had passed. When Homler performed last year in Berlin, a contemporary dancer manifested Breadwoman. It was the first time Homler had seen her “as a character, instead of me being inside Breadwoman looking out through the mask.”
Homler recalls bursting into tears, “because she really is something. She really is an archetype. She’s a character. She’s the primal other, and she’s also your grandmother.”