The desert stretches for miles behind the San Gabriel mountains where vocalist and composer Micaela Tobin was raised. Warmth and beauty are beset by vulnerability and harshness. A similar dichotomy plays out within the music of White Boy Scream, a conduit for Micaela’s visceral storytelling. Her operatically-trained voice is resonant, large like the peaks over her Los Angeles home, her electronic compositions as bleak and bright as the open expanses beyond. As The New Yorker observed, “She demands to be seen and heard for who she is:” ritualistic, communal, reverent, familial, singular. Empowered.
The patriarchal confines of both the opera and noise worlds were quickly apparent during her prestigious training; if Micaela was to have a place in music, she’d need to carve it herself. This is most actualized with her fourth release, Bakunawa (Deathbomb Arc, 2020), on which she not only intentionally combines her seductive incantations with biting industrial extremities, but pointedly incorporates a deep-dive into her heritage. Musically, Micaela carries a lineage started by the likes of Diamanda Galas and Scott Walker; compositionally, a deeper through-line is continued with her Filipino ancestors, from whom she received the album’s mythological and romantic themes. As her label explains: “Her voice is so unique that she’s defining for listeners what it means to create the sound of these ideas.”
The experimentation paid off: White Boy Scream received rave accolades, gaining a place on The Wire’s top albums of 2020 list, upholding the attention of her previous album, Remains (Crystalline Morphologies, 2018), also on The Wire’s top industrial/noise list for 2018. The “cataclysmic splendour” placed her on a Best of Bandcamp list, asserting, “Tobin’s voice is astonishing…The whole thing is unlike anything I’ve heard this year,” a sentiment repeated by critics and fans alike. The album’s strength garnered a film adaptation commission from REDCAT, shared bills with Zola Jesus and Dreamcrusher, and a coveted spot on Roadburn Festival’s 2023 line-up. Micaela created an oasis for herself amid an arid social environment.
The future for White Boy Scream holds the release of Apolaki, of which Mike Giegerich from Passion of the Weiss proclaims: “The work from Apolaki that Tobin has debuted live has been a brilliant showcase in the evolution of her art. At times more beautiful, at times more abrasive, it pushes her alchemized sound to its absolute limits [and] deepened her artistic reverence for ancestry and familial bonds. It’s the type of intellectual investigation that makes her catalog so spellbinding and the promise of Apolaki so great.”
US Booking & Management: rachel @ elasticmyths.com
EU Booking: federico.swampbooking @ gmail.com