Stilling You Softly

Remember how everyone used to call Scottish dream-pop group the
Cocteau Twins “ethereal” at every opportunity? Well, compared to Sokai
Stilhed (pronounced “sockeye steelhead”), Cocteau Twins are Slayer.

The Seattle singer/multi-instrumentalist’s music is barely
there, but it moves you deeply. Her voice sounds vulnerable yet

steadfast, supple yet ancient. Sokai (aka Heather Cullen) often
bathes her vocals in reverb and delay via GarageBand, lending
them
a penumbra of eeriness. Guitar, music
box, erhu (Chinese
violin), bodhran, and a beat-up accordion sparely augment her

ectoplasmic ballads and reconstructed folk and blues
standards.

Sokai’s two CD-Rs—Sokai Stilhed and Second, both
of which she packaged herself in paper left over from her parents’
wedding invitations—sound holy but untethered to any organized
religion; pagan, but without the look-at-me-I’m-so-fucking-radical
Burner associations. Sokai radiates an old-soul/back-to-nature aura
(it’s not surprising to hear that she works at City People’s Garden
Store).

Sokai Stilhed’s music is lights-low intimate and wispy, but not
conventionally “feminine.” Her sound transcends gender and
corporeality. It’s stripped-down like a spindly, denuded tree, but
built to last. It seems ideally attuned to dreams and spooked reveries.
If you need reference points, think Charalambides’ Christina Carter,
Linda Perhacs, and Valet/
Honey Owens—as well as Tim
Buckley’s Starsailor, especially in how she uses the voice as an
unorthodox instrument and sounds for their innately expressive value,
conveying something beyond language. But, really, Sokai’s songs exist
in their own world, nurtured by spiritually infused music, but too
lone-wolfish for revival tents.

Sokai’s musical jones was stoked by her older sister Eilish and
their blues-guitarist mother, who sang often and played records
constantly in the house. Sokai played flute in grade school, but she
claims not to know “music talk” (i.e., don’t ask her to sing in the key
of A, although she can do it).

“When I was growing up, my sister was always my main influence,”
Sokai recalls. “She would always make me listen to the music she was
into—so far as to make me memorize the lyrics.” She laughs
heartily.

Eilish’s forcefulness paid off, and she became a crucial supporter
of her little sister—plus, she gave Sokai her musical handle.
“[Eilish] said, ‘You always go against the current, and salmon are
always going against the current, their lives are always so hard, and
they’re always working so hard to replenish their species and the life
that’s around them,'” Sokai explains. “‘That’s you to a tee. You make
everything hard for yourself.'”

Eilish also booked her sister for what turned out to be a pivotal
event: an experimental-music gig at a lighthouse in the Bay Area (Sokai
had attended San Francisco State University for a couple of years in
the
mid-’00s before returning to Seattle in 2007). The venue’s
unearthly atmosphere and the bizarre music played by her billmates
inspired Sokai to focus more on her art. “The musicians would go right
up to the crowd and play instruments in their ears,” she remembers.

“After that, I realized you don’t need any rhyme or reason; you
just need to go for it to express yourself.”

Another key figure in Sokai’s growth as a musician is Wall of Sound
proprietor Jeffery Taylor, who also plays guitar in Climax Golden Twins
and AFCGT.

“If you ask him something, he’ll give you this wealth of
information, but he wasn’t trying to promote himself with his
knowledge,” Sokai says. “He honestly just wanted you to hear really
good music and be excited about music. So right off the bat, I had a
lot of respect and trust for him. I also love the music he creates, and
I like what he does for the music world in Seattle. He gives a lot of
people a chance, but he’s also selective.”

Sokai created her first album with Taylor in mind and sent it to
him, along with a letter, without trying to come across as another
attention-hungry upstart. “He wrote back and said, ‘The only advice I
can give you is to keep making music, and can you give me some copies
so I can sell them on consignment?’ I was blown away.”

Taylor’s encouragement spurred Sokai to record a second album. As
every CD is handmade by its creator, only about 55 Sokai Stilhed discs
have slipped out into the world, although local micro-indie Omiimii
wants to reissue the first one. It was once unthinkable that Sub Pop
would sign loner-folk savant Tiny Vipers; similarly, an artist as
distinctively other and introverted as Sokai Stilhed
could—and should—gain much wider exposure.

“I’m mostly a private person,” Sokai confides. “I’m not comfortable
with attention at all.” She may have to become accustomed to
it—sooner rather than later.

Sokai Stilhed performs at Hollow Earth Radio’s Magma Festival,
featuring an evening where several local bands cover songs from
Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness; she
is covering “Stumbleine.”