Scratch the surface of your being long enough and you’ll fall through into the abyss, a non-world without end, without up or down. Stripped of all context, it is a place where one is left prey to all the wraith-ish antagonists of the psyche; to survive here, one must not only battle them, but create the very terrain on which to wage one’s battles.
It is a space Chelsea Wolfe, raised in Roseville and Sacramento, has returned to time after time in her work, from the charred sparseness of Apokalypsis (2011) to the poisoned synth melodies of Pain is Beauty (2013) and the stormy, distorted depths of Abyss (2015). Taken as a whole, her stylistic arc is a gradually seething sojourn beyond the veil, gathering momentum and intensity, leading to the elemental fury and charged intimacy of her latest album, Hiss Spun (released Sept. 22, 2017). Tagged over the past few years with everything from “goth” to “doom-metal,” Wolfe’s heavy aesthetic is grounded in delicate songwriting and haunting, siren vocals—half-lullaby, half-lament—which cut through the smoke and fire of her most abrasive songs. It’s no wonder she’s managed to simultaneously rivet the gaze of the criticosphere while cracking the Billboard 200 with her last two releases.
Hiss Spun, while emerging clearly from Wolfe’s previous meditations on themes dark and dreamlike, and the contrast between turmoil in the landscape and within the psyche, is the most scourgingly personal of her artistic statements thus far.
She herself has described it as having an element of exorcism, and the suggestion of traumas corporeal and noncorporeal surge furiously to the surface of the lyrics at times. Such things can be gleaned by the listener; they refuse to be borne out in commonplace description, perhaps, but it is clear enough that they are used here as raw material to be sublimated through artistic excision. Against the clinical white background of the album cover (inspired by Wolfe’s visits in her youth to sleep research facilities) she crouches, not so much against the coming purge but to the task of making pain express itself at her bidding. Song titles like “Vex,” “Strain,” “Welt” and “Scrape” underline the volatility of the subject matter, as if a reactor were needed to contain it all.
Outside of the psychological underpinnings of her work, Wolfe is an artist who rocks in the most brutal, primordial sense of the term. Further amping up her distorted grandeur by utilizing additional guitar and vocal work from Queens of the Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen and Isis’ Aaron Turner on Hiss Spun, Wolfe’s succeeded in illuminating her ties to a grand tradition of soul-searing, head-banging music. If anyone can pull together the current demand for brutal emotional honesty and the newfound appreciation for the roar and hiss of black metal in 2017, it’s Chelsea Wolfe.
Fellow Sacramentans will have the chance to experience Wolfe at her latest creative height alongside pulse-shattering fright industrialists Youth Code at Ace of Spades on Nov. 3, 2017.
Photo by Mary Gebhardt
Just in the first couple listens, I get the feeling that Hiss Spun has a lot to do with destruction—not in the sense of an apocalyptic end, but a destructive creation, reordering, making and unmaking. Did this play a big part in the work?
While I was writing this album, there was a lot I needed to finally heal from: my own self-destruction and ill-health, my past and memories. There is a running theme in all my music of becoming stronger from getting through the difficult times—the forest needing the fire to regenerate—and it definitely continued on Hiss Spun.
You’ve said Hiss Spun is a host of small words and phrases with large meaning. What mindspace were you in to allow these terms to slowly gather together?
There are some keywords throughout that guide the album, and tie things together that may not otherwise seem connected. I was in a bad state while writing some of this album, but allowed myself to just be a mess and open up; allowed whatever needed to come out musically or lyrically to flow.
Listening to your discography in order, there is a clear building in anthemic intensity from one album to the next. Is this mostly the means you have at your disposal as you progress, a build in confidence, a rediscovery of influences?
A build in confidence as I get older yes, and a rediscovery of influence—especially on Hiss Spun. Each album I make has its own catalyst, and for this one it was the reunion of my friend and drummer Jess Gowrie and I. We had a band in Sacramento years ago called Red Host, and she really taught me a lot about being in a band, being a good front-person, and just turned me onto a lot of great, heavy music. After I left to pursue my own project, there was seven years of separation. We didn’t see each other all that time but were pulled back together about two-and-a-half years ago. As we became friends again it was clear that our musical chemistry wasn’t finished, so we started writing songs together. Those songs became the beginnings of Hiss Spun.
Do you have any favorite films that fuel your visual input and leak into your music? If you could re-score a favorite film of yours, what would it be? The Seventh Seal was an early influence for me. I saw it and then read Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography The Magic Lantern and was intrigued by his use of contrast and shadow. But also just the mood and concept of that film—the character of Death followed me for many years. The album cover for my first album, The Grime and the Glow, was in tribute to that, shot by my friend Jessalyn Wakefield. As for re-scoring a favorite film, I don’t know. My favorites already have such great soundtracks—Encounters at the End of the World, Cold Mountain, Cry-Baby. I’d like to score something totally new.
Faith and spirituality seems to be on the wane, but our willingness to discuss and tackle trauma and the burdens we have as humans seems to have grown. Do we still need a connection to the supernatural in our lives? How can it help us?
Finding a connection to the self is very important these days. Sometimes the deepest spirituality can be found inward. Once you know yourself, you can be of use to others.
While making this album, I heard you got back into popular alternative artists from the ‘90s like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. Around that time, it felt like there was a larger place for the willfully transgressive and “raw” nearer to the heart of popular music. Do you think we might be heading that way again in music as a whole?
Jess and Ben [Tulao, guitarist] and I would jam and write songs at my place, and then head to the dive bar down the street and play late ‘90s/early 2000s Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden, Manson, Deftones and Queens of the Stone Age on the jukebox. I’d love to see that kind of music in a more present way again. Like on SNL, for example, you rarely see rock bands anymore. And there’s not a lot of room for it on the radio either.
I often find the verge between sleeping and waking, whether by day or night, is a really fertile wellspring for ideas—good and bad. Do you find this useful in your work? And is there a way to make bad dreams/bad imaginative content “work” to benefit you?
I’ve been inspired by that state of mind for almost my whole life, without even realizing it most of the time. When I was a kid I had insomnia and bad night terrors. My parents took me to a sleep research facility where I was hooked up to all sorts of monitors and meant to fall asleep in a hospital bed in a small white room, to find what was wrong with me. That actually became visual inspiration for Hiss Spun as well, in the album cover and in the video for “16 Psyche.” Anyway, as I got older, I started having sleep paralysis regularly, but my version was not to be paralyzed, just waking up and the characters/shapes from my dreams were still in the room with me, often moving toward me, so I’d lash out or scream. It takes a while to move on from that haziness, and it would follow me into my day as I wrote new music. I still deal with bouts of insomnia sometimes and sleep paralysis. I’m not sure it’s something that ever goes away.
You’ll be coming up through NorCal and specifically Sacramento toward the tail end of fall. Is this your favorite time of year? What is your ideal natural setting?
Fall and winter are definitely my favorite times of year, yes. Where I live now it snows in the winter and that quiet is unmatchable. I plan to spend this winter doing psychedelic experiments on myself and working on songs for my next album. Even though I’ve spent a lot more time in Sacramento lately since I moved back to Northern California, I haven’t played a show there since 2012 so I really look forward to coming back and seeing many friends and family!
It’s been a while, so be sure to give Chelsea Wolfe a warm welcome when she returns to melt our faces at Ace of Spades (1417 R St., Sacramento) on Nov. 3, 2017, at 7:30 p.m. with special guests Youth Code and Screature. Tickets are $22.50 and can be purchased through Aceofspadessac.com.
Editor’s note (March 8, 2018): Chelsea Wolfe will be back in town to play Ace of Spades again on March 26, 2018, with Ministry and The God Bombs. Tickets are $35 in advance at Aceofspadessac.com. Doors open at 7 p.m., and all ages welcome.
**This article first appeared in print on pages 22 – 23 of issue #251 (Oct. 23 – Nov. 6, 2017)**
“It used to be really bad,” Wolfe says of her stage frustration. “I would play two or three songs and have to leave the stage. I didn’t like playing in an atmosphere where I didn’t feel welcomed, either by the sound person or venue or crowd–or myself, even–so in the past I’d just say ‘fuck it,’ and be done.”
But over the years, and perhaps even despite herself, Wolfe has been mesmerizing audiences, first capturing our attention with her 2010 release, The Grime and the Glow, a collection of catchy but distorted and unsettling tracks, like “Moses,” which reaches Black Sabbath levels of fuzz cut in half by Wolfe’s starkly clean, yet heavily reverb-y vocals. A year later, Wolfe would release Apokalypsis (again on Pendu Sound Recordings), which continues the musician’s penchant for darkness, yet pays strict attention to texture, both sonically and emotionally–the music displays a certain amount of gloom, but isn’t necessarily gloomy, and it’s Biblically referential without being obvious.
“I was religious during my formative years, so I think that sort of Biblical language permeated my way of thinking,” Wolfe explains. “Don’t read that as me having any sort of religious agenda, though. I am just fascinated by Biblical imagery, as well as Nordic and Greek mythologies. I’m into the ancient and the modern and constantly trying to reconcile them within myself and my songs.”
It’s “doom folk,” as some call it–a layered exploration of complexity caught somewhere in between PJ Harvey’s angelic call of the soothsayer and Gorgoroth’s wickedly dirty odes to Satan. In fact, Wolfe’s version of Norwegian black metal band Burzum’s “Black Spell of Destruction,” with unintelligible chanting and grating repetition, manages to sound less pop-y and a hundred times scarier than the original (if that’s at all possible). Wolfe’s fascination with the complexity of existence not only manifests in her eerie and beautiful music, but in pretty much everything she does.
“I’m inspired by a macro and micro view of the world…questioning everything from big to small. I like to explore contrasts: idealism and reality, physicality and spirituality, light and death,” she says. “Answers come in the form of epiphanies for me. Something about putting things into words and phrases, into a piece of work like a song or album, helps me to make sense of it. There was a perfect line in [Tom Robbins’ novel] Jitterbug Perfume: ‘The ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.’”
As for the reception of Wolfe’s music, it’s been overwhelmingly positive, from a glowing review by The Needle Drop’s feisty music nerd Anthony Fantano to an NPR review that literally left the writer scratching his head in blissful confusion (“When the slow-burning bummer that is Apokalypsis hits your misery nerve in clear focus, it hits hard,” wrote Lars Gotrich).
All-in-all, not bad for a Sacramento girl, right? Which then begs the next question: What’s the deal with artists living in Sacramento and then ditching it for Los Angeles? (Hear that, Trash Talk?)
“I took my time finding my voice and figuring out what the fuck I was doing with my music in Sacramento,” Wolfe says. “Sacramento is a great place to do that because there are very supportive folks there and a great community of musicians, but it was time for me to leave. I’ve always been an outcast musically anyway, so I don’t think it mattered where I lived; I just needed to be in a place where I was around people who were inclined to work and get things done in music and art.”
That said, Wolfe’s Sept. 5 return to Harlow’s in Sacramento (where she’ll play songs from both The Grime and the Glow and Apokalypsis, as well as new material, plus a few tracks from an upcoming acoustic album, Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs, due Oct. 16, 2012) brings forth a bit of moody ambivalence.
“I don’t feel particularly excited or not excited for playing in my hometown, but I do look forward to seeing friends and playing music,” Wolfe says. “I only wanted to do the show if I could put together the bill, because I’ve been wanting to play with Screature for a while now and I really didn’t want to come play with bands I’ve never heard before.”
And that answer–full of truth, edge and hesitance–is precisely the angst-ridden Chelsea Wolfe that we have come to adore: the kind who uses (in her own words) “harsh, King James phrasing,” the kind who colors the world in the black paint of truth netted with a laced veil of brusque melodrama…that is the Chelsea Wolfe we’re paying to see, whether we admit it or not. But the stage antics–the nervous rage, the pissy demeanor, the throwing of the instrument in a tantrum of mental anguish–are things of the past; it’s all under control, she says.
“Over the years…I challenged myself to stick it out even if I wanted nothing more than to get off stage,” Wolfe assures. “Now I only get weirded out if there are technical problems, but I still force myself to keep going and lose myself into the music no matter what’s happening around me.”
Chelsea Wolfe will play Harlow’s on Sept. 5, 2012 with Screature and ESS. Tickets are $10 for this 21-and-over show that gets underway at 9:30 p.m. To preorder a copy of Unknown Rooms and check out a sample song, go to http://chelseawolfe.bandcamp.com/.
Chelsea Wolfe’s The Grime and the Glow dresses folk music in a black cloak
Ravens perched on bare branches, snow falling on tombstones, wooden shutters clattering against cloudy window panes in a strong gale–these are just some of the visuals The Grime and the Glow, the latest fulllength album from Sacramento songwriter Chelsea Wolfe, may conjure in the imagination of the listener. Songs such as “Cousins of the Antichrist,” on which Wolfe intones “All in vain” in a steady refrain as the song ends, reinforce descriptions of her music as dark or goth folk. Wolfe herself describes another selection from the album, “Halfsleeper,” as “a slow-motion painting of what it’s like to die in a car accident with your loved one.” Wolfe, however, admits that The Grime and the Glow isn’t necessarily all doom and gloom–not that she’d mind if it were. She says that songs “Advice & Vices” and “The Whys” are more playful lyrically than she’d normally write. Wolfe describes the latter as “a song making fun of myself for taking everything so seriously.” But these concessions aren’t in hopes of lightening the album’s dark mood.
“I don’t mind it getting too dire,” Wolfe says in a recent interview with Submerge.
From the album cover, to the videos made for the songs, to the music itself, The Grime and the Glow seems born from a single cohesive vision. Wolfe says that the theme for the album came to her once its title was in place. She says the title is taken from the introduction to the novel Death on the Installment Plan, by French author Louis-Ferdinand Celine. The darkly humorous novel had quite an effect on Wolfe, even though she wasn’t able to finish it.
“I…read most of [it], but had to stop because of the dark place it puts my head space,” she explains. “I didn’t really need to dig any deeper into understanding that much of the beauty in the world is crawling with worms beneath the surface.”
To get the dark and distant sound that permeates the album, Wolfe took a much more stripped down approach compared to that of her previous release, Soundtrack VHS/Gold. For that album, Wolfe says she went into a nice studio in order to create a “tapenoise- sounding” album, but she “eventually realized how illogical that was.”
“It’s a very different album,” Wolfe says of her previous effort. “I wanted to get an eight-track sounding record in a nice studio. Didn’t make any sense, but we did mix it down to tape.”
This time, Wolfe took a more “logical” approach to making an eight-track sounding album by using an actual eight-track machine. The Grime and the Glow was recorded by Wolfe on a Tascam 488, a handme- down from her musician father, that she says she’s recorded on for years. Wolfe says that doing the album herself, on a familiar machine, “made it sound exactly the strange and special fucked up way I wanted it to sound.”
Strange and fucked up are excellent adjectives for The Grime and the Glow. Though the mood is consistently dark, songs range from the wildly dissonant “Deep Talks,” which grates Wolfe’s bittersweet voice through layers of noise, to the aforementioned “Advice & Vices,” a catchy piece of dark pop that’s as tuneful as it is morose–and she sure doesn’t skimp on the reverb.
“I also like clean, straightforward vocals sometimes and will experiment with that someday,” Wolfe says, “But for these songs I wanted to capture my voice or the instruments, whatever, inside a certain soundbox, so when you have your headphones on listening to it you feel like you’re in a tiny, claustrophobic echoroom or a parking garage cathedral.”
Adding to the eerie, almost antique sound of the songs is the album’s format. The Grime and the Glow will be released some time in June–pushed back from the original May 18 release date–on limited edition vinyl by New York-based label Pendu Sound. Wolfe says that it was the label’s decision to release the album on vinyl, but it’s a decision she’s happy with.
“I don’t think this album would work as solely a CD release,” Wolfe says.
In addition to the music, Wolfe has also been busy working on visual companions to the songs. The Pendu Sound Web site for The Grime and the Glow features a series of four videos created for “Advice & Vices,” “Moses,” “The Whys” (featuring camera work by local horror filmmaker Jason Rudy) and “Bounce House Demons.” The videos for “Moses” and “Bounce House Demons” star Wolfe’s friend, writer Jessalyn Wakefield, whom Wolfe calls, “a perfect visual muse.” At the time of our interview, Wolfe also mentioned that she was working on a video for the song “Widow,” which will feature a “goth-glam girl lip-synching the song in a dark studio.”
“I like the element of darkness mixed with a bit of silliness,” she says.
This mix of music and film comes as no surprise as Wolfe states that movies had a big influence on her in the making of The Grime and the Glow.
“The Seventh Seal is my long-time favorite film,” says Wolfe, who also listed David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Jean Rollin’s French vampire movies as sources for inspiration. “The character of death in that film has forever been an influence in my creative life. Ingmar Bergman in general is a big inspiration for me. The portrayal of life in his films is so honest and desolate but rich at the same time. Another favorite is The American Astronaut (Cory McAbee), a dark space-western with hand-painted special effects and a pretty low budget that manages to get such a defined feel across, haunting but still silly, like so much of the folk art I love.”
In fact, Wolfe finds inspiration from most forms of art–but not so much with other music.
“Throughout my life and for this album I’ve been very inspired by authors, poets, painters and filmmakers, more so I’d say than any band or musician,” she explains. “In fact, for many years I wouldn’t allow myself to listen to music because I didn’t want to infuse anyone else’s sound into my own–I wanted to see what would happen without that influence.”
The Grime and the Glow is a solo project, but it was still a collaborative effort. Andrew Henderson of G.Green, Ian Bone from Darling Chemicalia and Ruven Reveles all made appearances on the album. Kevin Dockter, Drew Walker and Addison Quarles (collectively known as The Death) and Ben C. also played parts and have come together to form Wolfe’s band. Wolfe, Dockter, Walker, Quarles and C. will be heading into a proper studio in June to record a fivesong EP. Wolfe says her past experience working on Soundtrack VHS/Gold will inform her decisions on her upcoming trip to the studio.
“I’m much more focused, and I’m also giving this recording a deadline,” she says. “I’m going to try and finish up five songs in about a week and a half, which will mean lots of late nights and hard focus. This project will also be with my band mates–all five of the songs will have the same five people on them, which is a first for me. But I’m very excited about the challenge of finishing something on a fixed time limit.”
Until then, The Grime and the Glow should sate those with appetites for dark music, as long as they don’t mind the worms.
The Grime and the Glow is available for preorder through the Pendu Sound Web site. Go to pendusound.com/releases/psr-0040/. Those who pre-order the album will receive four free bonus songs for download.
