When she talks about her music, Mira Billotte, singer,
pianist,
and primary songwriter for White Magic, uses words like “invoke,”
“intuit,” “spiritual,” and “different dimensions.”
The album art for White Magic’s 2006 debut full-length, Dat Rosa
Mel Apibus (translation: “The Rose Gives the Bees Honey”), is a
collection of kabbalistic diagrams, numerological sequences, and other
esoterica; the insert to this year’s Dark Stars EP unfolds
into a mandala of sacred geometry. And then there’s the band’s name,
and the band’s music—weird, piano-driven trance-folk displaced
from time and locale. Clearly, something metaphysical is at work with
White Magic.
“There are definitely different dimensions to this reality and there
are ways of reaching those dimensions through music,” Billotte says.
She’s on the phone in her Brooklyn apartment, the day after she
participated in a concert organized by Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo to
celebrate the release of I’m Not There, the surrealist Dylan
biopic for which she contributed a version of “As I Went Out One
Morning.” Brooklyn, she says, with its endless spectrum of cultures and
colors and reggaeton blasting from car windows, is inspiring, but in an
inverse way: The sound of White Magic—eerie, stark,
measured—is Billotte’s effort to imagine an entirely new
environment.
“An urban setting for the music is a little at odds,” she says.
“These songs fit well in a natural setting, and that’s what a lot of
them are about—landscapes and natural scenes. When I’m writing or
playing I fall into a different world, my own world. The trance aspect
of the music helps me get into that environment and invoke this whole
other world.”
There’s a tradition of trance music—qawwali, raga, didgeridoo,
techno—that spans ages and continents; White Magic sound nothing
like that. Take “Poor Harold,” a highlight from Dark Stars. It
builds from a simple piano refrain that’s repeated over and over,
faster and faster, accented by Billotte’s main foil Doug Shaw on
brushed, counterbeaten drums. “Poor Harold works all night/works in the
graveyard right next to my school/Digging graves, digging graves,”
Billotte sings, and disembodied voices float in the background as
dublike, wordless apparitions. It accelerates into a cyclic peak, then
the song returns to its original piano refrain. Its simplicity is its
magnetism, its repetition its drama. And that voice…
Billotte’s baroque yowl is a graceful, hypnotic instrument in its
own right, the only extravagant element of White Magic. Her
high-register delivery is ethereal but gutsy, floating through the rest
of the music like a tethered balloon lifting her songs from the
firmament. It’s a haunting vocal technique, totally unique, another
means of carrying the music into Billotte’s imagined worlds. “Certain
notes invoke a higher place and I instinctually follow those notes,”
she says. “I feel like voice is the purest instrument—it’s
straight from your mouth, it’s straight from your emotions, and in my
music it’s coming from my unconscious, my inner world. I don’t know how
to explain it, but I follow that and it takes me to these places.”
When the band first appeared with 2004’s Through the Sun
Door EP, they were umbrellaed with the freak-folk scene gaining
notoriety at the time: Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart from the West
Coast, Animal Collective and Gang Gang Dance on the East; White Magic
sound nothing like that, either. The band are friends with their East
Coast brethren (GGD’s drummer Tim DeWitt has toured and played with
them in the past) and, like them, hew closer to bang-a-can freak than
harp-stroking folk. But really, it’s an entirely different sound. “You
can’t just be retro,” Billotte says. “The spirit of ’60s music is very
apparent in the music I do, but it goes way beyond that. What I hope to
achieve is music that spans through the ages, music that sounds like
you don’t know what time it’s from but doesn’t sound like anything from
the past.”
White Magic’s chamber-band format sets them apart from other
freakish/folkish music of the moment, too. There are no orchestras or
glockenspiels or woodwind sections, just Billotte on piano and Shaw on
drums or guitar, with a bassist included on some tunes. Even when
adorned by extra instruments—the occasional sitar or
cello—arrangements are skeletal. If there’s another world wrought
by White Magic, it’s solitary and distant, only barely discernable
beyond the veil of reality.
“I try to express what can’t be expressed in any other way, what
can’t be talked about or even written about,” Billotte says. “I think
that’s what music can be.” 