Lavender Suarez

April 27, 2020
interview by Madeleine Campbell

A week after I moved to New York City last June,

I attended a performance of Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui’s Organ Within. The six featured artists improvised on a massive musical instrument installation which sprawled across the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. This was my introduction to Brooklyn-based sound artist Lavender Suarez. The irreplicable musical outcome of this evening’s concert, caused in part by environmental impacts of an untamed acoustic environment, is a familiar concept to Lavender’s work. Her upcoming third full-length album under the name C. Lavender, Myth of Equilibrium, was recorded in a geodesic dome in the Catskill Mountains. 

In addition to her regular performances, Suarez is a full-time sound healing practitioner. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, she has shifted her practices onto digital platforms like Instagram Live and websites of varying cultural organizations, allowing more people to experience her soundbaths and guided meditations. During a peak in the COVID-19 pandemic, we spent an afternoon discussing the development and intersections of her creative practices.

How are you doing?
I’m doing pretty okay. I’m grateful that I have this meditation practice, both internally and externally, that I can share with people right now. I can’t tell who it’s benefitting more. I hope it’s helpful for other people but it’s definitely helpful for me. 

That’s great. You’re staying busy with frequent online soundbaths. 
Yeah! People are at home and stressed out, so there’s definitely been more of an interest in it. I’m gonna do a soundbath on my Instagram at 7:00PM tonight. It’s a regular thing that I’m doing this month. I was also asked to teach a virtual introduction to meditation class for teenagers, which is pretty awesome. I’ve been doing that once a week through the Brooklyn Public Library.

Wow. I mean, on its own, to virtually teach meditation in such a strange time seems like it presents some unique challenges, but also to add the element of teenagers is really cool. 
What’s amazing is that the library reached out to their teen community and asked, “What kind of programming do you guys want?” and they specifically said, “We need help relaxing. We are all stressed out.” It’s what they want to learn. So far, they’re really good with it. I haven’t gotten trolled by teenagers too much.

Hey, that’s impressive.
Thank you!

What does it mean to be a sound healing practitioner? 
A sound healing practitioner is someone who utilizes sound in an intentional way to assist people with concerns about relaxation, wellness, pain or any sort of physical or mental health issue. It works with the idea that all sound is vibrational and has a psychoacoustic property. All sound interacts with your body. A lot of the time, we don’t necessarily notice. A sound healing practitioner is using sound in such a way that they’re directing it towards a person’s body or creating sound around a person’s body. It’s about shifting things for the person within whatever their wellness goal is. 

I’ve had some very different people come to me for sound healing treatments. Some people come to me when they are feeling a creative block. I’ve worked with a lot of musicians. When I first opened up my practice, as a way to reach out to the music community, I told musicians they could come for a free session if they gave me a copy of their album as payment.

I bet that paid off!
It did! I got a lot of cool albums out of that. Sometimes I was working with someone who might say, “I’m trying to finish up an album and I’m feeling really stuck. Having a sound healing treatment puts me in tune with music again and all kinds of ideas flood my mind after the session.” On the other side of the spectrum, I had a woman come to me when she was undergoing chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer, and that’s a very different kind of concern. She felt the sound healing treatments were a way for her to tend to herself outside of the grueling hospital situation she was in. She felt it helped her headaches go away. It made her feel more hopeful. 

So it’s very personalized. 
Yes. I don’t want to say it’s for everyone, but it can be utilized in such a way that each individual gets something different out of it. It’s a unique listening experience for a lot of people. 

What kind of studies or training did you undergo? 
My undergraduate education is in psychology and art therapy. It felt like a natural extension of being a musician, studying deep listening with Pauline Oliveros and building my own framework for how I approach sound and work with people. I’m certified in sound healing through the Sound Healers Association. 

So when you meet a new client, what steps do you take to get to know them and get started on a path that could work for them?
There’s always an initial consultation. I want to know why they are interested in sound healing, what’s going on for them mentally and physically. In the same way as you would at any medical office, I have a two-page survey that I use to check in with people. 

I also ask people what music they find soothing. I used to work at a women’s cooperative wellness center. They had massage, acupuncture, herbalism and a Reiki practitioner. I used to go to Reiki sessions and a lot of the time, I was distracted by the background music that would play. There were even a couple times where it made me feel quite dizzy. It’s hard for me to ever think of music as background music. I ask people what they find soothing because I do use a backing track for a little bit of the session and when I’m giving Reiki treatments. I think that helps give them a sense of agency and know they have more control over the session. 

Do you have a large library of sounds to choose from? 
I have a whole database of music and sounds. Sometimes people just want to hear white noise. That’s fine, too, but I think it’s important that people feel they have some input into what’s occurring for them. 

I also use singing bowls. Sometimes I’ll use tuning forks directly on people’s bodies. That works in a similar way as an acupuncturist uses needles, but it's less invasive. I also have gongs that I play. It’s working with all these different instruments and tools in a way that caters to the person’s needs. 

What is the intention of a soundbath? 
Those are the more open group sessions. It’s a more general introduction to meditation. I play gongs and singing bowls. I like those because it can turn into this ritualistic group listening experience and there can be this kind of crazy synergy in the room where everyone’s brain waves are kind of syncing up to the music. 

I love that it’s a nice stepping stone for someone who has no meditation practice. I think it’s easy to be intimidated by the idea of meditation. How did your practice start? 
It was a combination of things. I initially tried to go sort of a more traditional meditation route. There was a Won Dharma Buddhist Center near where I lived in Hudson, New York. They had a free Tuesday night silent meditation session. I started going there around the same time I was studying with Pauline Oliveros. There were moments where I did enjoy it, but there were also moments where I kind of felt worse after the fact. Sitting in silence like that, ideas would flood to my head even more. In moments of stillness, sometimes my brain would be on fire, like, “Remember all those things you have to do! Remember that weird thing you said the other day?” 

[laughs] I can totally relate to that. 
The times I enjoyed the most were towards the end of the class when we did a silent walking meditation. It’s a slow, really intentional walk, usually in a circle around a room. I feel like that worked for me. I was so nervous about falling down that I couldn’t think about anything else. [laughs] You have to keep a pace. Everyone kind of syncs up in this way where you become this moving unit of people. You’re doing something more active. A lot of times I’m playing a gong and that motion alone is so enjoyable for me. I can go into super immersive space just from the rhythmic motions. 

Are you originally from Hudson? 
I’m not. I was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Northern New Jersey. I went to college in the Hudson Valley [in New York], but it was close enough that I lived at home. After I graduated, I moved up to the town of Hudson and lived in a few different places around there upstate for nine years. This past year I moved to New York City. 

And while you were living upstate you were able to study with Pauline Oliveros, who developed the theories of Deep Listening? (1) 
Yes!

How did that experience come to life? 
When I moved to Hudson in 2010, the music scene was just starting to get moving. The main venue there, Basilica Hudson, had just opened. The community radio station, WGXB, had just started, although their parent organization, WaveFarm, had been around for a long time. Someone who ran a record store told me, “You should volunteer at the radio station and if you’re willing to drive 45 minutes, Pauline Oliveros is in Kingston and maybe you could do some intern or volunteer work for her.” It was a post-college what-am-I-doing phase and I thought, “Well, if I can’t find a job, I could at least go volunteer for one of my heroes.” It was as simple as writing to them and introducing myself. I did all kinds of odd jobs, made catalogues, helped performances come together. I had a big project where I did all the design work and compilation for [a book on] one of her performances called Tower Ring, where she performed in a huge tower in Northern California. There was a ton of documentation photography. She gave me copies of the score and recording. From looking at the score and listening to the recording, I had to figure out what order the photos should be in. It was a really immense listening test. 

Then I got to attend some of her Deep Listening retreats. I helped out a lot at the Deep Listening Art/Science Conference, which hosted people applying Deep Listening to different practices. I was running around making the catalogue, doing video documentation, organizing presenters, helping it all come together. 

You were right by her side for some really incredible moments.
Yeah. She did a lot of great events, but they were always wonderfully connected to the Kingston community. We played one of her pieces in the Kingston Farmers Market. It was a random action so people didn’t know it was happening. The piece is called King Kong Sing Along. People get two rocks and make pulsing beats with them. I’d have to look at the score for reference but part of the score has you saying people’s names aloud so all the performers were sort of triggering each other. You could call out other performers’ names, too. Lisa Barnard Kelley, for example, was the manager of the Deep Listening office. I was clacking these rocks together walking through the farmers’ market calling out [vocalizes] “Lisa! Lisa!” and people had no idea what was going on. Someone came up to me and asked if I had lost a child. I was in performance mode so I had to just shake my head and whisper, “No, I’m fine!”

[laughs] That’s hilarious. 
Yeah. To be in a couple collaborative group pieces with her was great. 

How has Deep Listening impacted your practices?
My initial attraction to it was how it could expand my skills as an improvisational musician. I think that’s a lot of the initial draw. I went into it thinking I would be able to tune in more to my fellow collaborators, but I realized it could also be a very internal process. 

Something that isn’t always mentioned about it is that there are a lot of aspects of movement meditation, too. She wanted listening to be a whole body practice. A lot of the Deep Listening workshops would start off with movement meditations to release tension in your body and open yourself up to make yourself more of a vessel for listening. One of her classic Sonic Meditations is, “Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” 

That’s an interesting visual! I want to talk about your new album Myth of Equilibrium. Congratulations on this really beautiful new work. 
Thank you! 

I love the Buckminster Fuller quote you included in the bio that says, “The future is a choice between utopia and oblivion.” Can you speak more about that and how it relates to the sonic arc of the album? 
That quote came out of the fact that the album was recorded in a geodesic dome and those were the focus of a lot of his work and interest. Geodesic domes, through his writing, kind of became this sci-fi utopian, sort of new-age imagery, like, “Yes, this is the perfect living vessel!” I was thinking about his work quite a bit when I was recording it, due to the nature of the location. Recording in that space did feel so inspiring. I could see the sky through the ceiling and I could see the sunset. I was in the woods. It was such a unique environment. It felt like anything could happen. 

So in regards to the album title, it’s reflecting on this idea that you have to make a decision about how you want to treat each day. You could go too far in either direction. When we talk about something being a utopia, there’s a grain of salt to take with that. It’s a hyperbolic idea of something. And in the same way, with ideas of oblivion, you can say, “Everything sucks. Everything is awful.” I think a lot of people are understandably feeling that right now. You want to ideally find somewhere comfortable to be in the middle. But the album’s title, Myth of Equilibrium, is suggesting that finding that happy center is almost an impossibility. Everyday things are shifting how we feel constantly, especially in the modern world where you can wake up in the morning and if you check the news, you can immediately throw yourself into a negative mental space. So how do you pull yourself out of that sensation? 

I find that with providing wellness services, sometimes people want an easy answer for how to feel better about certain things, but there are just so many factors that can throw us off, so it feels like we are constantly playing catch up with ourselves. 

“Recording in that space did feel so inspiring. I could see the sky through the ceiling and I could see the sunset. I was in the woods. It was such a unique environment. It felt like anything could happen.”

When you begin embarking upon a new original longform composition like this, do you have a set path in mind or are you figuring out that musical journey as you go? 
I’d say l really like working with different spaces and being very experimental with what I’m creating in a space once I’m there. When I initially made the first run of these recordings, I didn't quite know what they would become. It was almost like I created my own sample library. I made all these different little recordings and, except for maybe the two more synth-based tracks which were recorded later, they were edited in post-production and cut up to create tracks. So it’s not so much that I went in a space and performed something cut and dried. It was recording the instruments, exploring which sounds I liked and didn’t like, doing tons of takes and afterwards going through all those recordings and piecing them together like dominoes in a line. 

In the first track, I had a strong physical reaction to the low end. Is there something specific you’re attempting to induce through various frequencies and samples? 
I’ve been primarily interested in the physical experience of sound as opposed to the contextual. It also came out of getting more and more involved in my sound healing practice. Particularly in my live performances, I enjoy working with the whole spectrum of the physical experience of sound. I try to work within very high high frequencies and very low low frequencies and to really have both of them weave together. This felt like the first album I’ve made that was able to replicate a physical experience that is typically easier for me to convey through a live concert. Due to the binaural recording process of this album, it makes the sound so much more immersive. You feel more “in it” than you perhaps would with a standard stereo recording. 

I read you used a binaural microphone to capture a lot of these sounds. What is a binaural microphone?
A binaural microphone is meant to replicate the way that our ears hear naturally. It’s a paired set of microphones and when you’re setting it up you always want to have something in between each side of the pair. You want them to kind of face out the same way that your ears do. Some are even on a dummy head. For this recording, I placed them on either side of a music stand with some fabric on it so they didn’t pick up any music stand vibration sounds. It’s supposed to more closely reflect how we naturally hear. You can place them in a completely offset way or a slightly offset way. It’s typically the kind of recording technique you’d want to use for virtual reality or a video game.

Tell me more about the geodesic dome! 
I was really fortunate to have the assistance of a recording engineer for this album. The geodesic dome was on the studio property but it isn’t actually the main studio space so I was in the dome alone and my signal was run into the control room. We couldn’t see each other. It was all done by listening through headphones and communicating through a microphone. There were a couple times when we’d have some technical glitches and I’d have to just put my coat on and run across the property and have a conversation with the recording engineer. 

Did it present any environmental challenges?
It did! The dome did have a heating system, but it couldn’t be on when I was recording, so a lot was recorded around midnight at the end of October. It was just starting to get cold. I have video footage from these sessions where I can see my own breath. I became so physically aware of my own body. The heater from the dome also created some condensation around the dome. 

No! 
Yeah, so that started concerning me, too. It was cold outside and warm in the dome and the walls were thin. I was scared it was going to start accumulating on my electronics. It was actually like being in a living, breathing cell. I felt like I was always trying to catch up with the space. 

That seems especially poignant considering the inspiration for the work. 
What was also cool is that due to the nature of the dome not being a contained, soundproof studio space, when I listened back to the recordings for the first time, I heard all of these incredible unintentional sounds I had missed from wearing headphones. So much came through. 

1. Composer and pioneer Pauline Oliveros, founder of the practice of Deep Listening, describes the practice as “a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible, to hear no matter what you are doing.” There’s more to listening than meets the ear! Deep Listening, as developed by Oliveros, explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature of listening. The practice includes bodywork, sonic meditations, interactive performance, listening to the sounds of daily life, nature, one’s own thoughts, imagination and dreams. It cultivates a heightened awareness of the sonic environment, both external and internal, and promotes experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness and other creative skills vital to personal and community growth.
   ”About Deep Listening.” The Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer. https://www.deeplistening.rpi.edu/about-deep-listening/.

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Myth of Equilibrium will be released on May 15 through Editions Mego. Preorder the album here.

Follow Lavender online to keep up with her frequent soundbaths.
Instagram: @lavenderhealer

lavenderhealer.com
clavender.net
clavender.bandcamp.com