Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat // Full article via MXDWN
Oya Festival, one of Norway’s biggest annual music festivals, is ready to take place again August 7th-11th, 2018 in Toyen Park, Oslo. Previously held at Medieval Park, Oya is a four-day festival that has taken place every year in Norway since 1999, with previous headliners such as Beck, Sonic Youth, Iggy Pop, Arctic Monkeys, and Morrissey. The festival is also known as one of the greenest festivals in the world, heralded as the best in sustainable practices and recycling standards. A whole section of the festival’s website deals with info regarding waste and organic food.
The lineup for 2018 has been released periodically with some of the major headliners announced already. With tickets already on sale, the lineup thus far includes: Arcade Fire, Lykke Li, Chelsea Wolfe, Patti Smith, Grizzly Bear, Sleaford Mods, Noname, Wolf Alice, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, Converge and J Hus, with preceding shows all around clubs in Oslo from Paradise, Brockhampton, Noname, Dig Deeper, Fieh, Tones, Sassy 009, Smerz, Store P and Superorganism.
There are even more artists to be announced come January via the festival’s website, but you can buy tickets and read more about the festival on their website here.
It’s no secret that EarthQuaker <3’s Chelsea Wolfe. This track from 2017’s Hiss Spun is one of her heaviest yet. The guitars are shrouded in layers of effects, each one doing its part in the mix to elevate Wolfe’s vocal in a vortex of strength and noise. The album’s liner notes list an impressive roster of guests including Sumac vocalist Aaron Turner and QOSTA guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen.
Chelsea Wolfe’s music has morphed and evolved within a sonic realm of her own design—an artistic space that houses everything from intimate acoustic-guitar-driven sounds to bludgeoning industrial assaults to doom-tinged heavy metal. She’s armed with a voice that is inexplicably as delicate and powerful as it is haunting, often floating above the din and clang like a ghost over a battlefield. With her dynamic take on fingerstyle guitar and enough fuzz-drenched 6-string and synthesized filth to satisfy even the most desensitized sonic masochist, Wolfe’s musical cauldron has produced a unique stew of disparate sounds that is absolutely enchanting.
With her latest, Hiss Spun, the often self-contained and artistically mercurial siren has returned to making music with a band. The album was engineered and coproduced at GodCity Studio by tastemaking metal and hardcore producer Kurt Ballou, who’s also the extremely influential guitar monster of metalcore heroes Converge, and who enlisted Wolfe and Cave In’s Stephen Brodsky for 2016’s Blood Moon collaboration. Hiss Spun marks a reunion for Wolfe with drum powerhouse and longtime friend Jess Gowrie that influenced the album’s direction as Wolfe found inspiration in Gowrie’s deft drumming. Completed by Wolfe’s trusted right hand, coproducer, and multi-instrumentalist Ben Chisholm, the trio pumped out songs that flex with a distinctly more robust, (nearly) rock-oriented vibe for a Chelsea Wolfe album—something further driven home by the healthy dose of lead guitar that Queens of the Stone Age’s texture whiz Troy Van Leeuwen [sidebar with TVL on page 3] laced the songs with. However, make no mistake that while this may be what Wolfe describes as her “rock” record, Hiss Spun retains all of the bombast, nuanced melody, and meditative depth—underpinned by Ballou’s inimitable power and dynamic complexity—that have made the songstress a darling of the music press and her growing coterie of fans.
The album bristles with her varied collection of influences. As inspired by esoteric blues pickers and Fleetwood Mac as she is by drone-metal and British trip-hop, the layers that create Hiss Spun are rife with guitar fiber that includes passages of fragile nylon string butted-up against roaring, distortion-addled leads, and mock electronic pastiche inspired by and created with some of today’s coolest effects pedals.
While Wolfe’s songwriting has received its share of accolades over the years, her relationship with the guitar is something discussed less frequently—despite the fact that the instrument has been an ever-present element of her songcraft. Premier Guitar sought to rectify this situation by talking with Wolfe as she prepped for the first leg of a tour supporting Hiss Spun. She spoke about her identity as a guitar player, the songs that live in pedals and guitars, and the collaborative experience.
I’ve always been a big fan of the albums that Kurt Ballou works on with artists that fall a little outside of the world of metal and hardcore. Tell me about working with him. The reason I chose to work with Kurt is because I’m a big fan of how he records drums, and this is a very drum-heavy album. I reunited with an old friend in Jess Gowrie, who I used to be in a band [Red Host] with around 10 years ago. So her and I reuniting was really the catalyst for a lot of these songs and this record. Jess is a great rock drummer and I wanted to work with someone who could reallycapture her playing in its best light.
I also spent some time at GodCity in Salem [Massachusetts] last year when we did the Blood Moonproject, and I really fell in love with the space. It’s a really cool building and Kurt has some incredible gear—especially amps and guitars that I like—so it came together really naturally that it would be the right place to make the album. I knew the record was going to be heavy, especially on the guitars and drums, and I knew Kurt could capture that in the right way.
It’s really a self-produced album, to be honest. I went into the studio with everything demoed out to the point of completion. So working with Kurt was really more about us finding the right tones and atmospheres together, and counting on him to have the right instinct for those tones.
TIBIT: Hiss Spun was recorded by Converge’s Kurt Ballou at his GodCity Studio in Salem, Massachusetts, using mostly his collection of guitars, amps, and pedals. Overdrive and fuzz stomps were key.
The electric guitar plays a stronger role on Hiss Spun than on any of its predecessors. Was it your main writing tool this time around? Yeah! It was a lot of Jess, our bandmate Ben Chisholm, and I getting together and just jamming—where I’d come in with a riff or idea, or just let Ben and Jess play and hit record and then go back to work and build off certain parts from the jamming to build a song. Once we had songs together, we’d send them to Troy Van Leeuwen, to write lead parts for. The intent was definitely to keep it more of a band album and more of a rock album.
I caught the tour you opened for Queens of the Stone Age and I really love that a creative relationship spawned from it. Can you tell me what it is about Troy’s playing that made him right for this record? That tour with Queens was really important for me. At that time, I was thinking about going in a more acoustic direction again, and as soon as I was with those guys, hearing them play some of my favorite rock songs night after night and just seeing how much fun and energy they have, I decided I wanted to make heavy music and rock again. It sent me back on that path. Queens has been one of my favorite bands for a long time, and Troy is one of my favorite players, and we really hit it off on that tour. Troy and Ben kept in touch after that tour as well.
So once a few of these songs came together between Jess and I, Troy immediately came to mind as the right player for them. I really wanted to have some big guitar leads on it, and I left space specifically for him to do so—like on “16 Psyche,” there’s a big chunk of space that was left for Troy, which I’d thought about when I initially wrote the song. These songs also have some really twisted emotions in them, and I knew that Troy would understand that and where I’m coming from and channel it the right way. And he did!
Where are you coming from as a player? I tend to say I’m self-taught because, for me, that speaks to a certain style of playing that’s sort of wild and weird, and more intrinsic and not necessarily something that can be learned. When I was younger, I was envious of people that were classically trained on an instrument, but I just picked the guitar up to write songs and I taught myself to play really by writing songs, and I didn’t really learn songs by other artists or anything like that. So for me, it was about finding the right sounds to my ears and moving things around in a way that simply felt right. That really guided the sound of my project for years. I’ve been blessed to play with a lot of other really talented guitar players over the years, but I like to always make sure there’s a lot of my own guitar playing on the records as well, because it’s something that comes from deep inside me and is instinctual.
A lot of the stuff I play on guitar is very circular. I tend to trip out on a pattern for a while and I meditate on it and go from there. I don’t really know how to define it easily. I don’t think anything I do is very easily defined—unfortunately for the rest of the world, because I know the world likes to put things in categories, but it doesn’t seem to work very well for me.
While some choose to grow old gracefully, Chelsea Wolfe has chosen to get louder, harder, and gloomier. She’s still in her 30s, but with each passing year and album her sound gets fuller and darker. Her seventh record is her most personal, which explains why Hiss Spun is also her heaviest and most menacing effort. It is not for the faint of heart, but those who make it though the 48-minute masterpiece will be rewarded with one of the most intense and rewarding experiences of the year.
The walls come crashing in immediately on the doom-metal opener “Spun”, and they keep crumbling with the hypnotic “16 Psyche”, the brooding and hallowing “Vex”, and the eerily seductive “Offering”. Even in the moments where there is a reprieve, such as on slow building “The Culling“, Wolfe still finds a way to burn a hole through our soul. This time, it’s her lyrics, as she reveals wounds inflicted upon her by her family. Even in the fairy tale-like storyline of the graceful “Twin Fawn”, there is still devastation in Wolfe’s path.
To fully comprehend why the album’s atmosphere, one must experience “Scrape”, the most honest of Hiss Spun’s twelve songs. Wolfe’s voice ranges from aggressive to stunning to piercingly urgent as the song centers around her pedophile great-grandfather who “fucked up every woman in my family.” It is a startling admission by the fiercely private Wolfe on an album that surprises on every turn. This album’s biggest surprise isn’t how foreboding it is but that Wolfe has persevered and now offers a glimmer of light within the darkness. ~~~ Ben
For her fifth album, ‘Hiss Spun’, Chelsea Wolfe has delved deeper into both her past and present. Through ’16 Psyche’ and ‘Spun’, Wolfe picks apart health issue such as insomnia and anxiety, searching for some calm and catharsis. Whereas on ‘The Culling’, Wolfe declares “I’ll never tell the secrets of my family,” eluding to a dark history within her family that she had avoided on her previous releases. Musically, it is some of Chelsea Wolfe’s more towering work since the heaviest moments of her 2011 album, ‘Apokalypsis.’ The production from Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou gives a thick tone to every instrument. Ben Chisholm’s ominous keys weave through the layered wall of guitars, with Wolfe’s vocals pushed to the most haunting limit, even sounding aggressive at times. Overall, ‘Hiss Spun’ reveals yet another part of Chelsea Wolfe we hadn’t seen. It is oppressive and arresting, while every nuance is given enough breathing space to draw you into what could be the most emotionally jarring album of her career. [Glen Bushell]
The harvest was abundant and heavy: Chelsea reflects on a year that channeled the darkness of life into a lot of fine music by Zola Jesus, Fever Ray, Converge and more.
“2017 gave us a true lot of fine music. Artists reaping and culling their work and experiences, channeling the darkness of life along the way into audible productions for us to listen to and embrace. The harvest was abundant, and heavy. So bid 2017 goodnight my friends. Take a quiet moment to yourself after listening to these songs. Breathe deeply, let go of the past, and daydream of the coming year.” – Chelsea Wolfe
