Mirah
By Andres Jauregui

Photo By Emily Kingan

Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, the recording artist better known simply as Mirah, recently spent a lot of time learning about — and learning to appreciate — bugs. Her new collaboration with Lori Goldston and Kyle Hanson of Spectratone International, Share This Place: Stories and Observations, focuses entirely on the “tragic and triumphant lives of insects.”

Inspiration for the project, which began with a commission from the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in 2006, was somewhat accidental. Goldston had been reading the work of 19th century French naturalist J. Henri Fabre, and took an interest to the drama of the insect world.

“I guess if Lori had been reading about astronauts or something, then we would have ended up with a space theme,” Mirah says. “It could have been nautical. It could have been anything really. Mostly we were inspired to do something together, and then what it ended up being was a project about insects.”

Share This Place is Mirah’s second collaboration with Hanson and Goldston. Her first, To All We Extend the Open Arm (an album of covers with a subtle anti-war message), features Mirah’s vocals and the music of Hanson and Goldston’s Seattle-based Black Cat Orchestra.

Known for her plainspoken brand of lo-fi indie pop, Mirah began her solo recording career while a student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. She released her first album, Storageland, on Yoyo Recordings in 1997, before signing with K Records in 1999. A prolific artist, her albums You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This, Advisory Committee, Cold, Cold Water (EP), Songs from the Black Mountain Music Project and C’mon Miracle have all been released on K Records.

Mirah composed the melodies and wrote all the lyrics to the songs on Share This Place, which presented a special challenge: writing from multiple, first person, non-human character perspectives. “It was like taking on the voices of all these insects and their ways,” Mirah says. “I had to take on the character roles and all the vocabulary that that entailed ... I’ve never written songs with such heavy reliance on the use of a dictionary before.”

Each song on the album is a detailed vignette from the insect world, interwoven with themes of villainy, seduction, self-sacrifice and love. While the lexicon of mandibles, exoskeletons and pupae remind the listener that these songs relate to bugs, the emotional energy and vibrant lyricism Mirah infuses easily humanize the subjects.
Yet for all Mirah’s input, Share This Place bears the jubilantly mottled markings of artistic collaboration. The music, composed by Goldston (cello), Hanson (accordion), Jane Hall (percussion) and Kane Mathis (oud, or Middle Eastern lute), draws heavily from the music of Turkey and the Near East, lending an exotic feel to the album that would please fans of bands such as A Hawk and A Hacksaw and Beirut.
There is even a multimedia aspect to the album. Filmmaker Britta Johnson contributed a selection of stop-motion animation films to the project, one of which, “Credo Cigala,” is included on the album. The films were screened with an accompanying live performance by Mirah and Spectratone International at the Seattle International Children’s Festival in May 2007.

Although the theme of Share This Place came to Mirah and her collaborators at random, Mirah admits that the project has been a growing experience. Long hours spent ruminating over and researching the lives of insects left an impression on her.
“I’m not an uncompassionate person, but it’s not like I never killed bugs in my whole life before,” Mirah says. “[But] now, for example, I have this ongoing interaction with the ants in my house, just trying to figure them out, at times feeling frustrated, and at times feeling interested.”

With a propensity for taking her collaborations as seriously as her solo work, Mirah has established herself as a prolific and important artist in the Northwest music scene. On Share This Place, her capacity for creativity transcends the experiences of people’s day-to-day lives to lend beauty and compassion to a world largely unseen by human eyes.

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