Crossing the vastness of shared space, a howl is a primal force of expressive, open communication and release, a mesmerizing free call that not only connects us to each other but to the outer and inner landscape of our creative, performing bodies.
Howl Space is a community-based learning resource that reframes vocal pedagogy through holistic, process-based approaches to discover the multi-faceted possibilities of the voice and unveil the creative process.
By offering individual sessions, focused rotating monthly skill and process workshops, a series of salons with guest artists and producers whose practices focus on different aspects of the holistic voice, Howl Space offers both personalized and group development.
With over 20 years of experience working, performing and creating with the voice, sound artists and vocal experimenters Carmina Escobar and Micaela Tobin have united their unique praxises creating Howl Space, a laboratory for the voice. Howl Space serves as a boundless and focused virtual space for exploring, expressing, and connecting the relational, artistic, musical, and medicinal possibilities of the voice and vocal traditions. This space was created for anyone interested in expanding the possibilities of their expressive voice. All ranges of experience, creative goals, artistic practices and styles are welcome.
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Carmina Escobar
Carmina Escobar is an experimental extreme vocalist, improviser, sound and intermedia artist from Mexico City. Her work includes pieces of installation, performance, multimedia, as well as collaborative and interdisciplinary works. She has explored the capabilities of her voice developing a wide range of vocal techniques that she applies to her sound as well as to investigate radical ideas about the voice/body.
She has presented her work at various festivals, biennials, experimental spaces, museums, galleries, concert halls, and theaters of the Mexican Republic, Europe, Cuba, and the United States, such as: PST: LA / LA 2018 (Los Angeles), Cuban Art Factory (Havana), Borealis Festival (Norway) CTM Festival (Berlin), World Dada Fair 2016 (San Francisco), Current LA Water 2016 (LA), RedCat (LA), Machine Project (LA), MexiCali Biennial, MACO Oaxaca, The Wende Museum, I-Park Environmental Art Biennial, New Music Festival 2016 (Czech Republic), MATA festival 2018, Borealis Festival 2019 (Norway) among others.
Artist in residence in Montalvo (San Francisco), STEIM (Holland), Binaural (Portugal), OMI (NY), Krakow Academy of Music Electroacoustic Music Studio (Poland), Guapamacataro (Morelia), FONOTECA NACIONAL (Mex), and The MacDowell Residency.
Carmina has received the Endowment of the Arts in Mexico on three occasions, the USArtist International Award with the project Estamos Ensemble, the Master Scholarship of NALAC foundation for latin artists, the 2020 FCA Grants for Sound Artist. Her music has been published by Abolipop Records, a wave press, Edge Tone Records, and Relative Pitch Records. She is co-founder of the experimental and contemporary music ensemble from Mexico LIMINAR, the performance improvisation trio FILERA, and ESTAMOS TRIO.
Escobar is currently a faculty at CalArts, teaching voice technique, experimental voice workshops, contemporary vocal music, and interdisciplinary projects regarding the voice. She has sustained a private studio for voice lessons for over 15 years, and has facilitated workshops with cultural and artistic institution as the Pomona College Claremont in the Art School, The Superior Art Institute in Cuba, Colgate College in the Art Department, The Rubin Center in El Paso Texas, The Janacek Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno Czech Republic, The University of New Mexico in the Music Department, The Monterrey Opera studio in Mexico, as well as the circuit of Cultural National Centers of the Arts in Mexico. Avid collaborator with the museums she has developed workshops with The Austin Museum of contemporary art, Nameless Sound organization in Houston, the Binaural organization in Portugal, Machine Project in Los Angeles, among many others. Carmina’s teaching philosophy prioritizes process before system, behavior before form, and intuition before reason, in this way leading to vocal awareness, and muscular memory through Artistic impulse rather than only form, in order to generate an organic understanding of vocal process.
Micaela Tobin
Micaela Tobin is a soprano, sound artist, and teacher based in Los Angeles, CA who specializes in experimental voice and contemporary opera, composing under the moniker “White Boy Scream.” Her practice centers the voice as a tool of sonic empowerment through reframing operatic modes of performance practice. Concerning her recent full length album, BAKUNAWA, Steve Smith of The New Yorker magazine states that “Opera would do well to pay attention.”
Micaela has performed extensively throughout the western United States, most notably as a guest with hip-hop experimentalists clipping. during their 2017 tour in support of The Flaming Lips. Micaela’s other full length release, Remains (Crystalline Morphologies) was listed as one of the top 10 Noise/Industrial Albums of 2018 by The Wire magazine.
Micaela premiered and earned a five-star review for her first original experimental opera, entitled Unseal Unseam, at the world’s largest art festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in summer 2016; the work was described as “hypnotic” and “paralyzingly beautiful,” by New Classic LA after its U.S. debut in October 2017. She most recently performed a principal role in the critically acclaimed experimental opera, Sweet Land (comp. Raven Chacon & Du Yun), which made its U.S. premiere in March 2020.
Micaela Tobin is currently on Faculty as a Voice Instructor at the California Institute for the Arts. Her prominent students include Daveed Diggs of Hamilton: An American Musical, who credits Micaela with “saving [his] voice, mind, and life.”