Listeners familiar with Brent's previous work will notice that in Beyond Appearances Brent's rich baritone voice is even deeper, more resonant and more expressive than before - this depth comes not only from his decades of experience as a singer, and from his maturity as a person, but from his work exploring the healing powers of sound. SOUND MEDICINE A highly intuitive artist, Brent Titcomb has always followed where his voice has led him. Almost twenty years ago, Brent was sitting in his kitchen with a friend, when a quiet hum began inside him. "I wasn't consciously doing it," Brent explains, "This sound wound its way through my being, and I was watching it with surprise and then awe and wonder. Then it stopped, and my friend exclaimed that he felt as if he had just been massaged inside him. I had slipped into resonance with him, and intuitively the sounds that came out were in perfect tune with his needs vibrationally. It had happened without my will." Brent had been initiated into a branch of esoteric phenomena called sound medicine, or vibrational medicine, an ancient form of healing recognized in many traditions, including Buddhism, Hindu yoga, and traditional Native American medicine.		"This sound wound its way through my being, and I was watching it with surprise and then awe and wonder."
	SYMPATHETIC RESONANCE Over the years Brent has developed his own healing practice of "sympathetic resonance" - finding the sound vibrations in the human voice that bring the body, mind and soul back in tune with each other and their own natural energy. He conducts these vocal release sessions with his wife Cheryl Russell or on his own. As Cheryl describes these highly intuitive collaborations: "We vibrate with you. Intuitively it comes through us, a tuning into the moment for that person and feeding it back in sound." Brent's remarkable voice becomes part of the energy that fills the space of the moment, akin to a very deep gong that resonates for several minutes, or chanting the word "OM" in yoga. There can be the uncanny sensation of having your whole body swathed or touched with sound. the sounds range from deep guttural drones like Buddhist chanting, through humming, full-bodied singing, loud exclamations and falsetto keening. The vibrations of the sound reach deep inside and release suppressed or blocked emotion and energy in the body, bypassing words altogether. The sounds create an environment that allows you to tune in to your own intuitive self, and whatever you need to do to further heal yourself - it may release your own spontaneous sounds and movements and allow you to find the healing power of your own voice. The result in increased energy, clarity, connectedness, and integration, and a general feeling of wholeness and wellbeing.
	VOCABLES Brent's healing practice has not only changed his voice; it has influenced his songwriting as well. There are three songs without words on Beyond Appearances, which instead use "vocables," or phonetic syllables without fixed meaning, a practice common in traditional Native American singing. Brent explains that often in writing a song he would reach a certain point in the song where he would not yet have lyrics and would sing vocables until the occurred to him; in fact, many of his songs retain a section of vocables in the finished song. But more recently, he has found that vocables can also be liberating in themselves. "I don't feel any compulsion to sing lyrics all the time; for me, vocables can be interesting and convey emotion. They are freer for me, the freest expression I have. I can surrender and let my voice flow - to express joy without words is effortless. I can convey depth through sound, in what some people might call a chant." Chants, vibrations, humming -- all these elements have brought this unusual singer-songwriter to the deepest places within himself, to the voice beyond words. -Victoria Freeman		"I don't feel any compulsion to sing lyrics all the time; for me, vocables can be interesting and convey emotion. They are freer for me, the freest expression I have. "