Alissa Vox RAW

VOX
Alissa Vox Raw
Now here is one brave creative concept. Alissa Vox Raw (Alissa Klug) describes herself as "a vocal/instrumental looper", and she terms her recently released EP VOX "indie/soul/ experimental a cappella". She possesses a strong and soulful voice that occasionally brings PJ Harvey and Anna Calvi to mind, and this is sometimes complemented by sparse but effective sonic loops. The results are compelling on these varied original compositions.

The disc was recently launched at Supermarket in Toronto. Vox has performed extensively on the T.O. circuit and last year appeared at the SING! Texas fest in Austin. Check her website for upcoming gigs.

Kerry Doole - New Canadian Music

Alissa Vox Raw "VOX"

Alissa Vox Raw renders the spirit of soul with a modern experimental edge. She creates a unique style of exploratory Motown-pop songs made entirely from her voice. Alissa Vox Raw is a one woman machine; she is a multi-instrumental looper, who even plays a mean kazoo. Her latest EP “VOX” released this March, is an incredible play of 60’s soul sounds raw. “Where I’m Going, I Don’t Know”, kicks off the EP off with a shuffle in its step with breathy beats behind an empowered vocal. “Don’t Ask Me Why” is smooth with warm tones that get your body swaying to a bebop vocal that loops into sing-a-long harmonies. “Don’t Keep Me Waiting” gets you clapping along with attitude. Alissa’s entire EP is creative, taking styles of the 60’s to new contemporary heights. Catch a glimpse of her EP below. Coming our way soon go to her web page for show listings. - The Deli

If a jazz diva from the 1920s were reincarnated into the body of a multitrack-looping indie songstress, you would get Alissa Vox Raw. Often with no more than a loop pedal and her voice, she creates rich tapestries of sound from a multitude of organically-built harmonic parts, interwoven to create full music beds. Old style soul, doo-wop and blues are reinterpreted through new technologies and given a contemporary twist. - City of Toronto

Walkin the Fine Line – “Bucky James & Alissa Vox Raw”

The new collaboration between Toronto electronic/rock artist Bucky James and Alissa Vox Raw jumps right in with a punchy kick and snare intro that you gets you ready for creative energies to follow. Featuring edgy synths and a layered vocal track that fits the pulsing rhythms, “Walkin the Fine Line” is dance worthy track that fans of electronic music won’t want to miss. - Grayowl Point

Alissa Vox Raw performs at BuskerFest
Annex resident goes a cappela in downtown Yonge area, Aug. 22 to 25
Alissa Vox Raw
Photo/LISA MURZIN
Alissa Vox Raw will sing a capella with a loop station at the upcoming Scotiabank Buskerfest, Aug. 22 to 25 in downtown Yonge St. area.
City Centre Mirror
ByJustin Skinner

Armed only with her voice and a loop station, Annex resident Alissa Vox Raw (AVR - real name Alissa Klug) is getting set to take the Scotiabank BuskerFest by storm.

AVR has been singing on the Toronto scene for years, working with various bands and ensembles but took to performing solo when she started using a loop station. The device allows her to record stanzas of music as she sings and then replay them on a loop as she records additional sections.

The end result is a virtual choir of her own voice singing every part of her original blues-and-doo-wop-infused songs and even taking on the role of some instruments.

“I’ve always loved harmonizing with whatever I’m listening to,” she said. “Even when I’m listening to something without a harmony, I’ll just add one.”

She was first intrigued by the idea of using a loop station when performing with guitarist Mark Sepic in Yorkville. He was looping guitar riffs while playing jazz standards and the effect opened up a new world of possibilities for AVR.

“I sang the first line of a melody and didn’t know he was recording me,” she said. “I wound up with a whole choir of my voice singing Summertime and that planted the seeds.”

She began recording a cappella songs at home and often performs solo shows using only that as an instrument, though she is also proficient when it comes to playing various instruments including the guitar, the synthesizer and the djembe.

While her vocal prowess can carry a show, AVR still performs with accompanists from time to time. Doing so with a loop station, however, poses additional problems.

“If you make a mistake with a normal performance, people don’t notice but with a loop station, that little mistake will keep looping back at you,” she said.

When others are added to the mix, hitting the perfect notes at the perfect time become that much more crucial.

“The loops act as a kind of metronome for the song, so with a loop station, you have to be exactly in time with the looping at all times,” AVR said.

Her loop station performances have earned her plenty of stage time around Toronto and beyond – she played the Make Music New York Festival in June – and she is working on her debut album.

She finds her Annex area home perfectly suits her musician’s lifestyle.

“I’ve always wanted to be downtown as long as I’ve lived in Toronto and here, both (subway) lines are very convenient,” she said. “It’s a great neighbourhood and great for getting around the city.”

AVR will perform at the Scotiabank BuskerFest, which will run from Thursday, Aug. 22 through Sunday, Aug. 25 in the downtown Yonge area.

For more information on the artist, visit www.alissavoxraw.com. For further details on BuskerFest, including a lineup of performers, visit www.torontobuskerfest.com - City Centre Mirror

Canadian Monday
Posted on: June 26th, 2013 by Jon Berger No Comments

This Monday, 6/24 at the Sidewalk Open Stage, experienced a little bit of an invasion. A table of Canadians was in the room.

Normally, I have little truck with foreigners (defined as people who were not born and bred exclusively on Manhattan’s West Side), but Toronto’s like a NY suburb, right? And anyway, Alissa Vox Raw was kind of amazing.

She used a loop pedal (and a little help from some other Canadian), to pretty magnificent effect, primarily adding a chorus of voices to generate a joyful noise indeed. Instead of going weird or ephemeral, little miss Vox Raw harmonized girl group style with herself, building an astounding choir of her.

I liked it. The host did, too. “Looping,” he cried at the end of her two songs, “Looping that I like!”

We may never see Alissa again, because, as I mentioned before, she’s kind of Canadian. But what a chance meeting that was…
- Jon Berger, sidewalkny.com

One-on-One with Alissa Vox Raw
Posted on October 22, 2012 by glasspaperweight


by Michael Thomas

Depending on the circumstances, you may see Alissa Klug decked out in Mexican Day of the Dead face paint, performing reggae music or playing solo with the aid of a loop pedal. Klug is a musically busy woman, to say the least.

Klug knew she wanted to be involved with music since she was very young. But she didn’t know that she had any musical talent until she was 10 years old, when auditioning for a school play. “I sang the song that we were supposed to audition for and everyone in the room was quiet,” Klug said. “And from then on it became not just an interest in music but an interest in being a performer.”

That interest in being a musician has culminated so far in three acts Klug plays in. She plays in a reggae group called RudeBoy RudeGirl with her friend Newton Walker. And then there’s Zuviri, a project started by Julio Zuviri which is described as “experimental Spanish folkloric pop.”

“It’s really kind of eerie, a lot of it,” Klug said. In this band she plays the cajon, a type of box drum. “Very ambient, it’s very experimental. We also tend to be very costumey, we kind of go with the feel of what we’re singing about. So we often paint ourselves with Day of the Dead makeup.” Google the band and you’ll see how eerie they can get.

It’s already obvious that Klug has had a lot of musical influences, and her solo project Alissa Vox Raw is a way to play with them.

“Ever since I was young I’ve been a bit of a nomad. I spent many years in Asia, Latin America… I worked in Brazil, I studied in Cuba, I recorded in Africa. It was just really all over the world,” said Klug. “[I was] interested in how many vast and varied cultures there are in the world and everything that goes along with those cultures. Mostly the music, and how the culture is reflective of the music and vice versa.”

Her globetrotting stint led her to encountering musicians whose command of their craft was “unreal,” as Klug describes it. She remembers being at a school of the arts in Havana, Cuba. “From morning til night all you heard was people playing, people tuning, it was just music at all times.”

Alissa Vox Raw as an act has existed for about two years, but the inspiration for looping came at a much younger age. “Whatever capacity I was listening to something, I always loved to harmonize on it, even if there were no harmonies in the song,” Klug said. Klug got her first taste of looping when a friend of hers asked her to do backup vocals for a show he was doing. He had a loop pedal for his guitar, and they soon began playing around with Klug’s looped vocals.

“Before I knew it, it was like a whole choir of my voice,” Klug said. She then began to play around with all kinds of software and hardware at home to see what worked best for her, and in the end she decided on hardware (a loop pedal) as opposed to software (carrying around a computer). “I wanted it to be more

organic,” she said.

Writing songs with loops actually comes pretty easily for Klug: “It’s easy to write when you’re just using your voice. I can just hum anything or make a three-second vocalization of whatever kind for a few seconds, do a couple harmonies on that.” As a percussionist, she also loves counter rhythms, so her songs as Alissa Vox Raw will tend to be very percussive even if there’s no actual percussion in it. As for ideas, Klug will sometimes have a phrase pop into her head, and she’ll build the song around that. A song of hers called “Don’t Keep Me Waiting” began with the line “‘Cause I’ll be waiting.”

There is no official recording for Alissa Vox Raw yet, though Klug is working on an album right now which she hopes to have out in the winter. It will be called Vox Edit, which also plays on the way Klug got the name for the project. While doing edits for radio, any unedited clips from musicians would be labelled with the artist names plus “vox raw.” After the clips were edited, they would be labelled with the artist’s name plus “vox edit.”

Klug is also no stranger to festivals, having recently played Indie Week to an exceedingly packed Free Times Cafe. “It’s fairly intimate, but I’ve never seen it that packed,” Klug said. “And if it wasn’t for the fact that people were coming and leaving they would have never fit everyone in there. We had to be kind of creative for getting seats for people.”

In the future, Klug hopes to tour outside of Canada, specifically to the UK and other parts of Europe. Having been in Toronto for a while now, perhaps she is once again longing for the nomadic lifestyle she once lived. - Grayowl Point

MUSIC: You know what’s a really neat trend in new music? Looping. If you’ve ever seen Owen Pallett or Atlas Sound live, then you’re familiar with the notion of a single musician looping various instrument sounds until they’ve recreated almost an entire band. Here, then, is jazzy artist Alissa Vox Raw, who will be presenting her looping style as part of a set for Indie Week (there are also several other artists playing throughout the night that are well worth checking out). Free Times Cafe (320 College Street), 7 p.m. (Raw’s set starts at 9:20 p.m.), $8. - Torontoist

In one word: loops. low almost raspy voice layering over itself in a dizzying pattern of 1940's meets synth
http://www.myspace.com/alissavoxraw - Alina

Alissa Klug is to Alissa Vox Raw what Julie Harris was to “The Belle of Amherst“. This one woman a’cappella looping/layering show is inspiring to watch and impossible not to groove to. She is a world traveler and her exposure to a variety of musical traditions shows strongly in songs like “Not the face” which is fun and has a great sense of soul and rhythm, sans formal rhythm section, while more experimental recorded tunes such as “Where are you now?” are quite serene and meditative. - Meghan Morrison's Blog Page

Though the album hinted at a few years ago hasn’t seen the light of day yet, the very busy Alissa Klug has finally unleashed her a cappella goodness as Alissa Vox Raw with an EP. Vox sees the sound engineer by trade creating a mini-choir with just her own voice, and touching on a variety of genres.

Her profession certainly helps with the EP—mixed by Harrison Fine and mastered by Karl Machat. There’s a great degree of control over the various harmonies and “instrumentals” that prevent her songs from ever becoming a cacophony. And it’s pleasingly varied, moving from soul to R&B to a Caribbean on the turn of a dime.

The EP has some soulful bookending, so to speak. “Where I’m Going, I Don’t Know” and “Don’t Keep Me Waiting” both show that Klug has some major power in those pipes. Both feature some nice backing vocals and vocal percussion. The former song seems to be about the unclear path life lays out for somebody, while the latter is kind of an ultimatum—keep up or ship out.

The other five songs see Klug experimenting a little more with pitch and genre, and the more she ventures off the beaten path the more exciting she becomes. “My Sweetheart” at first sounds like just a take on old-timely soul. And while that’s pleasant, with a bit more than a minute left the beat slows down and everything feels distorted—it’s a great twist.

“Down By the Sea” invites listeners to feel like they’re underwater—there’s just the faintest hint of echo on Klug’s vocals as she sings about “taking your letter down by the sea” but being unable to wash away the words. ”

Then there’s “The Path,” which is a much slower build before any words are sung. It gives the song a more contemplative, almost spiritual atmosphere. And then “You See Me Coming” takes a left turn into R&B, with Klug’s “percussion” at its most pronounced.

The crown jewel of the EP is undoubtedly “Don’t Ask Me Why,” which features wobbly vocalizations and hand claps to create a tropical atmosphere. Despite the relaxing setup, the lyrics about the struggles to make money and be happy are relatable to anyone.

Some great VOX, indeed. - Grayowl Point