If Chelsea Wolfe’s 2015 album Abyss dipped its toes in metallic waters, then Hiss Spunis the Gothic singer-songwriter’s dark baptism. It’s been a long time coming: Ever since 2011’s head-turning Apokalypsis, Wolfe’s stylistically diverse discography has grown increasingly heavier, but unlike the metal-leaning songs from Abyss that played with crushing textures via depth-defying electronics and sweeping noise, the heft is now explicit.
Chelsea Wolfe will be performing a short, all-ages set at Amoeba Music in Los Angeles on Friday, September 29th at 6pm with signings of Hiss Spun after.
Chelsea Wolfe will be performing a short, all-ages set at Amoeba Music in Los Angeles on Friday, September 29th at 6pm with signings of Hiss Spun after.
“What I want is to open up. I want to know what’s inside me. I want everybody to open up. I’m like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin—to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I’m sure of it.” – Henry Miller
Digging beneath the mess of the world to find the beauty underneath is perhaps the most consistent theme in Chelsea Wolfe’s expansive discography—a theme that ties together her ceaseless explorations in unorthodox textures, haunting melodies, and mining the grandeur embedded within ugliness and pain. With her sixth official album Hiss Spun, Wolfe adopts Miller’s quest to become empowered by embracing the mess of the self, to control the tumult of the soul in hopes of reigning in the chaos of the world around us. “I wanted to write some sort of escapist music; songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free,” Wolfe says of the album before extrapolating on the broader scope of her new collection of songs. “You’re just bombarded with constant bad news, people getting fucked over and killed for shitty reasons or for no reason at all, and it seems like the world has been in tears for months, and then you remember it’s been fucked for a long time, it’s been fucked since the beginning. It’s overwhelming and I have to write about it.”
Listen to the full episode here. Also available on itunes.
Hiss Spun was recorded by Kurt Ballou in Salem, Massachusetts at the tail end of winter 2017 against a backdrop of deathly quiet snow-blanketed streets and the hissing radiators of warm interiors. While past albums operated on the intimacy of stripped-down folkmusic (The Grime and the Glow, Unknown Rooms), or the throbbing pulse of supplemental electronics (Pain Is Beauty, Abyss), Wolfe’s latest offering wrings its exquisiteness out of a palette of groaning bass, pounding drums, and crunching distortion. It’s an album that inadvertently drew part of its aura from the cold white of the New England winter, though the flesh-and-bone of the material was culled from upheavals in Wolfe’s personal life, and coming to terms with years of vulnerability, anger, self-destruction, and dark family history. Aside from adding low-end heft with gratuitous slabs of fuzz bass, longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm contributed harrowing swaths of sound collages from sources surrounding the artist and her band in recent years—the rumble of street construction at a tour stop in Prague, the howl of a coyote outside Wolfe’s rural house in California, the scrape of machinery on the floor of a warehouse at a down-and-out friend’s workplace. Music is rendered out of dissonance—bomb blasts from the Enola Gay, the shriek of primates, the fluttering pages of a Walt Whitman book are manipulated and seamlessly integrated into the feral and forlorn songs of Hiss Spun.
The album opens with the sickening bang of “Spun”, where a lurching bottom-heavy riff provided by Chisholm and Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age, Failure) serves as a foundation to a sultry mantra of fever-dream longing and desire. The first third of Hiss Spun—whether it’s the ominous twang and cataclysmic dynamics of “16 Psyche”, the icy keyboard lines, restless pulse and harrowing bellows of Aaron Turner (Old Man Gloom, SUMAC) on “Vex”, or the patient repetition and devastating choruses of “The Culling—all carry the weight of desperation, lost love, and withdrawal. Wolfe’s introspection and existential dread turns outwards to the crumbling world around us with “Particle Flux”, an examination of the casualties of war set against an aural sea of static. White noise is a constant thread through Hiss Spun, with Wolfe finding solace in the knowledge that radio static is the sound of the universe expanding outwards from the Big Bang—a reminder that even dissonance has ties to creation. The electronic thump of “Offering” serves as an ode to the Salton Sea and the encroaching calamities stemming from climate change. The obsession with white noise and global destruction carries over into “Static Hum”, where the merciless percussive battery of Wolfe’s former bandmateand current drummer Jess Gowrie helps deliver the dire weight of a sonnet dedicated to a “burning planet.” By the time the album closes with “Scrape”, Wolfe has come full circle and turned her examinations back inward, reflecting over her own mortality with arguably the most commanding vocal performance in her entire oeuvre.
“The album is cyclical, like me and my moods,” Wolfe says of Hiss Spun. “Cycles, obsession, spinning, centrifugal force—all with gut feelings as the center of the self.” And it’s an album that Wolfe sees as a kind of exorcism. “I’m at odds with myself… I got tired of trying to disappear. The record became very personal in that way. I wanted to open up more, but also create my own reality.” Every Chelsea Wolfe album is cathartic, but never before has both the artist and her audience so desperately needed this kind of emotional purging. Sargent House is proud to release Hiss Spun to the world on September 22nd, 2017.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
Her radio show through Red Bull Music Academy called “Hypnos Hour" The process of discovering yourself as an artist The novel "1Q84” written by Haruki Murakami The film “The Seventh Seal” directed by Ingmar Bergman Writing lyrics and song writing Psychedelics opening up access portals Her collaboration with Converge Her new album “Hiss Spun"
The intensely private musician shines a light on her personal life and family history to create her most real and raw work yet
This isn’t how Chelsea Wolfe remembers things at all. We’re in a corner bar in downtown Los Angeles, a noirish watering hole with a throbbing trip-hop soundtrack that she used to frequent during seven years of living and making music in the naked city. She’s returned for an afternoon visit dressed in elegant layers of vampire black; a three-legged raven tattoo is apparent on her left forearm as she hovers over a purplish mixed drink. But everything is askew as a big-screen TV blasts a sporting event and sunlight shines brightly through the long windows around her.
“I’m a little thrown. This bar used to be my favorite,” she says, having her first drink here since she moved back to the woods of Northern California a year ago. The shadows are Wolfe’s preferred comfort zone, where she makes music in smoky shades of black and gray, with intense flashes of melody and distortion that reflect what the singer-guitarist calls “the brutish side of myself.”
Her interior life has also been largely kept in the shadows. She’s revealed little of her own story in song lyrics and media interviews, begging off questions that cut too close to the personal.
“I never talk about this stuff,” Wolfe says. “My extended family — there is just a lot of darkness there. I don’t know how to get into it without being emo.”
On her fifth album, Hiss Spun, she finally turns the light on herself, reaching backward to old feelings and memories of self-destruction and the pain of watching a lover fade in a cloud of addiction. The result is her most complete and dynamic offering to date, the definitive achievement thus far of an artist who has won a diverse and devoted fan base by being hard to define, daringly spanning the worlds of goth rock, neo-folk, electronic music and metal. On Hiss Spun, Wolfe whispers and wails to sounds that are characteristically wide-ranging, shifting from noisy to ethe- real, gloomy to cinematic, but the lyrics cut deeper than ever before. On the creeping “The Culling,” she hints at some grim family history: “I’ll never tell the secrets of my family/Bled out/A cult of anonymity …” On “Scrape,” she rages of “a young nymph defiled.”
It comes up more than once, reflecting an old secret that she explains has shattered the peace among her extended family, a subject she isn’t ready to fully talk about. “It’s too big of a bomb to drop,” she says of the secret revealed to her at 19 by her maternal grandmother. “My family is all very estranged because of something that someone did to everyone in my family.”
She looks up from her drink and adds casually, “My family is pretty fucked up. The way that I came out is not like a big surprise.”
At age seven, Chelsea Wolfe wrote her first poem, already overloaded with atmosphere and observation: a rainy day, dogs barking, a siren rushing past and thoughts about where that siren might be heading. “I would space out sometimes,” she recalls. “My family was like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I was thinking about the whole world around me, and all these sounds and sadness and happiness that were happening at the same time.”
She grew up in Sacramento, California, splitting time between her mother, her grandmother, and her father and stepmother. One house overlooked a graveyard, with daily funerals of diverse denominations. Her father is a country musician who handed down one of his guitars to Wolfe and taught her how to record in his home studio. (They once sang together at a tribute to Dolly Parton.) When she turned 18, her father drove young Chelsea to get her first tattoo: a Celtic cross on her back.
“I grew up pretty fast. I had older sisters. By the time I was 11, I was drinking 40s and getting fucked up and getting in trouble and smoking weed,” she remembers. By high school, she was bored enough with drink and drugs to stop, then started experimenting with it again in her twenties.
Her early musical forays included a grungy trio called the Red Host, named after a 1911 erotic expressionist painting by Egon Schiele. Also in the group was her close friend Jess Gowrie, who plays drums in her current backing band. The songs were raw and brooding, hinting at the Wolfe music to come, but after a couple of years of playing around town, she chose a solo path. There was a falling out with Gowrie, and they were mostly out of touch for several years.
“I knew that I had to follow my own vision. I was young and still very curious about what I could do musically on my own and with other people,” Wolfe says now. “I knew that it was going to be a very painful thing. So a lot of getting over that was her forgiving me for leaving this project, and me forgiving myself for hurting a good friend.”
Her reunion with Gowrie began when Wolfe was again spending time in Sacramento after years away. Gowrie took her out regularly for karaoke, and Wolfe made Black Sabbath’s teary “Changes” and other Ozzy standards her specialty. The drummer turned her on to some Nineties music (Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, etc.) Wolfe missed the first time around. They also began experimenting with their own music again, a collaboration that evolved into a new album under the Wolfe name: Hiss Spun.
“Some of my favorite moments on the record are when she is really going wild,” Wolfe says of Gowrie, whose influence on the singer goes back a decade. “She really helped me become the frontperson that I am because I was always really shy,” Wolfe says. “She was always really encouraging and pushing me to play lead guitar parts and sing and do as much as I could. When we reunited, it was almost like a triumph: We’re friends again, we’re making music together again. I really wanted her to shine on this record.”
Another key player on several Hiss Spun tracks is guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen of Queens of the Stone Age. Wolfe met the sharp-dressed guitarist while she was opening a short run of shows with Queens in 2014. Van Leeuwen introduced himself by mixing drinks for Wolfe and her band backstage. Also on that tour, Wolfe got an essential piece of advice and encouragement from Queens leader Josh Homme.
During her shows, Wolfe often spits onstage, but was careful on that tour not to hit any Queens gear. Homme told her not to worry. “I didn’t want to fuck up their stage,” she says now. “Josh was like, ‘No, do your show fully. Be you and go for it.’ Having the backing of a band you look up to so much was really great for my confidence as a live performer. I feel like I’ve grown a lot since that tour.”
During the Hiss Spun sessions late last year, Van Leeuwen traveled out to Salem, Massachusetts, for a few days to join Wolfe at recording engineer (and Converge guitarist) Kurt Ballou’s GodCity Studios. “Instantly, it was great,” she recalls. “I was begging Kurt: ‘Please, let’s start recording and get all this shit and figure out the right direction to go.’ Troy would hit these notes that were gut-wrenching.”
It’s a descriptor that applies to Wolfe’s music in general. At their core, her songs are still inspired by the “real and raw and fucked-up” examples of Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt, American songwriters who shared a gift for authenticity and despair. “It’s the honesty of it,” she explains. “I always wanted to know there are two sides to every story. I want some brutal honesty.”
On Hiss Spun, Wolfe’s brand of brutal honesty begins with a wild screech of feedback, launching the emotional swirl of “Spun,” as electric guitars slice across a foundation of distortion and Wolfe sings, soft and soaring: “You leave me reckless, you leave me sick/I destroy myself and want it again.”
The sound is meticulously layered, shifting from delicate to grinding on “Spun,” which Ballou called “a big sloppy rock song.” The album’s first single, “16 Psyche,” follows a similar trajectory, unfolding from a brooding riff and menacingly tumbling beats. Then comes “Vex,” colliding death-metal angst with Gothic gloom, erupting with a guttural roar from guest vocalist Aaron Turner of Isis, Old Man Gloom and Sumac. “I get chills every time he comes in,” says Wolfe.
An emotional peak on the new album is “Twin Fawn,” equal parts romance and tragedy, beauty and loss. “It hurts to stay, but it hurts to stop,” Wolfe sings to an achingly gentle guitar that soon explodes with thundering wrath, as she cries: “You cut me open/You lived inside.”
“Part of that is about being in love with someone who’s addicted to drugs,” she explains. “I’ve experienced that before — trying to help that person, and at the same time the frustration when someone doesn’t want to be helped. There are a lot of love songs out there. I hope that I can write a good love song someday, but for now I tend to write songs about the more practical sides of love — when you’re actually putting work in, spending time with someone, trying to help them through something, or they’re trying to help you through something, the give and take.
“There’s definitely some anger on this album,” she continues. “There’s anger about the election and what’s to come from that. There’s anger that’s directly expressed from the viewpoint of a woman, and thinking about what my foremothers had to go through, and what I had to go through sometimes.”
On the cover of Hiss Spun, Wolfe depicts herself as a cornered animal, photographed on her knees and backed against a white wall in a black dress made of hair, head bent downward, a single eye peering dangerously forward. “I knew that I wanted to represent some kind of messiness and just being fucked up,” she says of the feral image. “I do feel like there is a lot of pressure on women artists to be like, ‘I have my shit together’ — and it’s not always like that. I’m a messy person. I’m self-destructive a lot of time. I wanted to represent that.”
A week after her visit to the bar in Los Angeles, Wolfe is on the phone, between rehearsals back home with her band. A fall tour of the U.S. is still many weeks away. Her family secret comes up, and she considers the possibility that revealing too little could lead to wild imaginings.
She hesitates to say more. “I really don’t want to hurt anyone in my family, because a lot of them were more affected by it than I was,” she says. After a moment, she explains, “Basically, my great-grandfather was a pedophile and fucked up every woman in my family. I don’t always feel that it’s my story to tell, because it was an older generation of women who had the worst of it.”
It’s a story that mostly unfolded years before her birth, but Wolfe remembers him. “I was around him when I was a little kid. So there is some blurriness there that I won’t get into.”
Bringing the story into the light, and dealing with her family history, has been part of a larger process for Wolfe. It’s not just a personal journey, but also one meant to connect with listeners dealing with their own lives and anxiety. She makes a point of talking to fans after her shows.
“I’ve never gone to therapy. This is my version of that,” she says of making art that explores life’s hidden places. “At the same time, I’m trying to write from the human experience or write about being this mess of a person who’s trying to come to terms with things, and finding strength through that. Even though there are some really dark moments on this record, all of my music is about overcoming that and pushing forward and surviving another day.”
This isn’t how Chelsea Wolfe remembers things at all. We’re in a corner bar in downtown Los Angeles, a noirish watering hole with a throbbing trip-hop soundtrack that she used to frequent during seven years of living and making music in the naked city. She’s returned for an afternoon visit dressed in elegant layers of vampire black; a three-legged raven tattoo is apparent on her left forearm as she hovers over a purplish mixed drink. But everything is askew as a big-screen TV blasts a sporting event and sunlight shines brightly through the long windows around her.
“I’m a little thrown. This bar used to be my favorite,” she says, having her first drink here since she moved back to the woods of Northern California a year ago. The shadows are Wolfe’s preferred comfort zone, where she makes music in smoky shades of black and gray, with intense flashes of melody and distortion that reflect what the singer-guitarist calls “the brutish side of myself.”
Her interior life has also been largely kept in the shadows. She’s revealed little of her own story in song lyrics and media interviews, begging off questions that cut too close to the personal.
“I never talk about this stuff,” Wolfe says. “My extended family — there is just a lot of darkness there. I don’t know how to get into it without being emo.”
On her fifth album, Hiss Spun, she finally turns the light on herself, reaching backward to old feelings and memories of self-destruction and the pain of watching a lover fade in a cloud of addiction. The result is her most complete and dynamic offering to date, the definitive achievement thus far of an artist who has won a diverse and devoted fan base by being hard to define, daringly spanning the worlds of goth rock, neo-folk, electronic music and metal. On Hiss Spun, Wolfe whispers and wails to sounds that are characteristically wide-ranging, shifting from noisy to ethe- real, gloomy to cinematic, but the lyrics cut deeper than ever before. On the creeping “The Culling,” she hints at some grim family history: “I’ll never tell the secrets of my family/Bled out/A cult of anonymity …” On “Scrape,” she rages of “a young nymph defiled.”
It comes up more than once, reflecting an old secret that she explains has shattered the peace among her extended family, a subject she isn’t ready to fully talk about. “It’s too big of a bomb to drop,” she says of the secret revealed to her at 19 by her maternal grandmother. “My family is all very estranged because of something that someone did to everyone in my family.”
She looks up from her drink and adds casually, “My family is pretty fucked up. The way that I came out is not like a big surprise.”
At age seven, Chelsea Wolfe wrote her first poem, already overloaded with atmosphere and observation: a rainy day, dogs barking, a siren rushing past and thoughts about where that siren might be heading. “I would space out sometimes,” she recalls. “My family was like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I was thinking about the whole world around me, and all these sounds and sadness and happiness that were happening at the same time.”
She grew up in Sacramento, California, splitting time between her mother, her grandmother, and her father and stepmother. One house overlooked a graveyard, with daily funerals of diverse denominations. Her father is a country musician who handed down one of his guitars to Wolfe and taught her how to record in his home studio. (They once sang together at a tribute to Dolly Parton.) When she turned 18, her father drove young Chelsea to get her first tattoo: a Celtic cross on her back.
“I grew up pretty fast. I had older sisters. By the time I was 11, I was drinking 40s and getting fucked up and getting in trouble and smoking weed,” she remembers. By high school, she was bored enough with drink and drugs to stop, then started experimenting with it again in her twenties.
Her early musical forays included a grungy trio called the Red Host, named after a 1911 erotic expressionist painting by Egon Schiele. Also in the group was her close friend Jess Gowrie, who plays drums in her current backing band. The songs were raw and brooding, hinting at the Wolfe music to come, but after a couple of years of playing around town, she chose a solo path. There was a falling out with Gowrie, and they were mostly out of touch for several years.
“I knew that I had to follow my own vision. I was young and still very curious about what I could do musically on my own and with other people,” Wolfe says now. “I knew that it was going to be a very painful thing. So a lot of getting over that was her forgiving me for leaving this project, and me forgiving myself for hurting a good friend.”
Her reunion with Gowrie began when Wolfe was again spending time in Sacramento after years away. Gowrie took her out regularly for karaoke, and Wolfe made Black Sabbath’s teary “Changes” and other Ozzy standards her specialty. The drummer turned her on to some Nineties music (Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, etc.) Wolfe missed the first time around. They also began experimenting with their own music again, a collaboration that evolved into a new album under the Wolfe name: Hiss Spun.
“Some of my favorite moments on the record are when she is really going wild,” Wolfe says of Gowrie, whose influence on the singer goes back a decade. “She really helped me become the frontperson that I am because I was always really shy,” Wolfe says. “She was always really encouraging and pushing me to play lead guitar parts and sing and do as much as I could. When we reunited, it was almost like a triumph: We’re friends again, we’re making music together again. I really wanted her to shine on this record.”
Another key player on several Hiss Spun tracks is guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen of Queens of the Stone Age. Wolfe met the sharp-dressed guitarist while she was opening a short run of shows with Queens in 2014. Van Leeuwen introduced himself by mixing drinks for Wolfe and her band backstage. Also on that tour, Wolfe got an essential piece of advice and encouragement from Queens leader Josh Homme.
During her shows, Wolfe often spits onstage, but was careful on that tour not to hit any Queens gear. Homme told her not to worry. “I didn’t want to fuck up their stage,” she says now. “Josh was like, ‘No, do your show fully. Be you and go for it.’ Having the backing of a band you look up to so much was really great for my confidence as a live performer. I feel like I’ve grown a lot since that tour.”
During the Hiss Spun sessions late last year, Van Leeuwen traveled out to Salem, Massachusetts, for a few days to join Wolfe at recording engineer (and Converge guitarist) Kurt Ballou’s GodCity Studios. “Instantly, it was great,” she recalls. “I was begging Kurt: ‘Please, let’s start recording and get all this shit and figure out the right direction to go.’ Troy would hit these notes that were gut-wrenching.”
It’s a descriptor that applies to Wolfe’s music in general. At their core, her songs are still inspired by the “real and raw and fucked-up” examples of Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt, American songwriters who shared a gift for authenticity and despair. “It’s the honesty of it,” she explains. “I always wanted to know there are two sides to every story. I want some brutal honesty.”
On Hiss Spun, Wolfe’s brand of brutal honesty begins with a wild screech of feedback, launching the emotional swirl of “Spun,” as electric guitars slice across a foundation of distortion and Wolfe sings, soft and soaring: “You leave me reckless, you leave me sick/I destroy myself and want it again.”
The sound is meticulously layered, shifting from delicate to grinding on “Spun,” which Ballou called “a big sloppy rock song.” The album’s first single, “16 Psyche,” follows a similar trajectory, unfolding from a brooding riff and menacingly tumbling beats. Then comes “Vex,” colliding death-metal angst with Gothic gloom, erupting with a guttural roar from guest vocalist Aaron Turner of Isis, Old Man Gloom and Sumac. “I get chills every time he comes in,” says Wolfe.
An emotional peak on the new album is “Twin Fawn,” equal parts romance and tragedy, beauty and loss. “It hurts to stay, but it hurts to stop,” Wolfe sings to an achingly gentle guitar that soon explodes with thundering wrath, as she cries: “You cut me open/You lived inside.”
“Part of that is about being in love with someone who’s addicted to drugs,” she explains. “I’ve experienced that before — trying to help that person, and at the same time the frustration when someone doesn’t want to be helped. There are a lot of love songs out there. I hope that I can write a good love song someday, but for now I tend to write songs about the more practical sides of love — when you’re actually putting work in, spending time with someone, trying to help them through something, or they’re trying to help you through something, the give and take.
"There’s definitely some anger on this album,” she continues. “There’s anger about the election and what’s to come from that. There’s anger that’s directly expressed from the viewpoint of a woman, and thinking about what my foremothers had to go through, and what I had to go through sometimes.”
On the cover of Hiss Spun, Wolfe depicts herself as a cornered animal, photographed on her knees and backed against a white wall in a black dress made of hair, head bent downward, a single eye peering dangerously forward. “I knew that I wanted to represent some kind of messiness and just being fucked up,” she says of the feral image. “I do feel like there is a lot of pressure on women artists to be like, ‘I have my shit together’ — and it’s not always like that. I’m a messy person. I’m self-destructive a lot of time. I wanted to represent that.”
A week after her visit to the bar in Los Angeles, Wolfe is on the phone, between rehearsals back home with her band. A fall tour of the U.S. is still many weeks away. Her family secret comes up, and she considers the possibility that revealing too little could lead to wild imaginings.
She hesitates to say more. “I really don’t want to hurt anyone in my family, because a lot of them were more affected by it than I was,” she says. After a moment, she explains, “Basically, my great-grandfather was a pedophile and fucked up every woman in my family. I don’t always feel that it’s my story to tell, because it was an older generation of women who had the worst of it.”
It’s a story that mostly unfolded years before her birth, but Wolfe remembers him. “I was around him when I was a little kid. So there is some blurriness there that I won’t get into.”
Bringing the story into the light, and dealing with her family history, has been part of a larger process for Wolfe. It’s not just a personal journey, but also one meant to connect with listeners dealing with their own lives and anxiety. She makes a point of talking to fans after her shows.
“I’ve never gone to therapy. This is my version of that,” she says of making art that explores life’s hidden places. “At the same time, I’m trying to write from the human experience or write about being this mess of a person who’s trying to come to terms with things, and finding strength through that. Even though there are some really dark moments on this record, all of my music is about overcoming that and pushing forward and surviving another day.”
The latest record by California’s Chelsea Wolfe – titled Hiss Spun, released on Sargent House – often illuminates the physical burden of living. Fuzzed out guitars are dragged along by a lethargic rhythmic drive, like a body driven down by the weight of organs and skeleton and contemplation, pushing forward through a will that just barely overpowers the desire to stop. Yet this album is also ecstatic, explosive; radiating far beyond the limits of corporeal self, channelled through Chelsea’s voice as it bursts upward through the chorus of “16 Psyche”, or evaporates into whispers during the verses of “Vex”.
As a listener, I’m still wrangling with the paradox at the centre of this beautiful record (a fact likely reflected in the rambling detours taken by my questions). Below, we discuss the natural beauty within Northern California, writing music within intense quiet and the relationship between escapism and the body.
Your comments accompanying this record have referred to the idea of “opening up”. I’ve seen you talk about it being a very personal work as well. As a listener, I’ve always felt a connection to what I perceive to be a very rich emotional sincerity within your music. Perhaps I’m mistaken in this feeling. What is it about Hiss Spun that has warranted a greater focus on the “personal” in contrast to your previous records?
Last year I moved back to Northern California, not far from my hometown, so I was spending more time with family and old friends. That naturally dug up a lot of memories for me, and without really realizing it I started writing a lot of lines for this album that referred to those very personal memories, and dealt with the more daunting ones in that way as well. But I’m always emotionally tied to my songs, whether they’re about my own life or not; I give a lot of myself to each of them.
I’d love to know more about the guest contributors to Hiss Spun. Aaron Turner makes an appearance during a particularly intense section of “Vex”, while Troy Van Leeuwen contributes guitar to the record. How do you know these musicians, and how and when did the idea arise to bring them into the creation of the album?
I met Troy when my band and I opened up for Queens of the Stone Age for a couple tours in 2014. On the first night of the tour, Troy came to our room with Hutch and started making us mixed drinks. We fast became friends. A couple years ago I reunited with my friend, drummer Jess Gowrie, after a period of years apart. We started writing some songs together along with my bandmate Ben Chisholm, and the raw nature of these songs made me think of Troy. We sent some songs over for him to hear and he sent back his ideas, which were perfect and just what the songs needed. After we had a few, I felt it was a shame for these songs not to get played live so I proposed that they become the next Chelsea Wolfe album, and there it went. Aaron Turner and I met when I played some shows with Mamiffer, and I’m a big fan of his band Sumac. I felt like his voice was a good grounding element for this album.
Your vocal delivery on this album is wonderful. The opening section “Twin Fawn” is playing as I write this question, the swoops and quivers of which seem so deliberate and exact; almost like a finger tracing the sides of a ceramic sculpture. Over the years, have you noticed any particular changes in your relationship with, or utilisation of, the voice within the context of your music?
As I’ve learned what my own voice can do and pushed it further, I’ve used it in more tactile ways and yea, I think you can sense that on “Twin Fawn”. There’s a line in that song about being in a long distance relationship: “I feel you, phantom touch, although you’re far”. These are really intimate songs so I wanted to capture that sonically as well.
How and when do your songs initially come to you? I know that some artists generate their music through the physical process of playing; others are struck by songs as conceptual ideas that are later realized through instrumentation. What does it look like for you, and does it vary between tracks or albums?
It does vary. Sometimes the music dictates the melody, sometimes the lyrics guide the songs.
On a similar note, do you have a special place or environment – say, in your home – where these songs are initially written and nurtured into being?
I do write a lot at home because for the past few years I’ve set up a home studio wherever I’m living. Last year, while I was between houses, I stayed with family for a while. I didn’t have much space to myself so my liberation from that was to write or listen to music in headphones often – I was reminded of the beautiful escapism of music.
You refer to what I perceive to be a paradox of sorts, where you mention that you“wanted to write some sort of escapist music; songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free”. When so many of the narratives around escapism is leaving the body behind, how do you perceive this reconciliation between bringing an awareness to the body and this bid to escape?
There are stories on this album about addiction, sex, relationships – those can be very physical things while still providing escapism. Escapism isn’t always the healthiest way to quell anxieties. I’m not glorifying it, just trying to be honest about it.
I understand that this record was recorded in Salem with Kurt Ballou. How did you find the experience of working with Kurt and recording the album?
I was already a fan of Kurt and how he records, drums especially, and I knew this was going to be a very drum-heavy record, featuring Jess. That was a big factor in wanting to work with Kurt, but I also had a chance to visit his studio last year while working on a project with Converge and I fell in love with the space. The studio is three levels: the basement dungeon, the main studio, and the upstairs apartment and vocal room. I liked the different realms you could escape into. As a bonus, I have some good friends in Salem and was able to collaborate with them on the album artwork.
I’ve seen you talk about writing “psychedelic love songs to nature”. How does nature feature in your life? Do you spend a lot of time in nature? If so, are there any places that you particularly enjoy visiting?
California is diverse when it comes to natural beauty and I’ve been lucky to live in different areas over the years to enjoy the different landscapes. I grew up in Northern California near mountains, rivers, giant trees, and not a far drive from the ocean. When I moved to Los Angeles I was able to spend more time in desert landscapes. I love to visit Joshua Tree and I love to visit the giant sequoias. I moved out of Los Angeles four years ago and into the high desert for a while, as a test to see if I could handle living outside of a city, and found it was really great for me. Less distractions means more mental space to work and write, and something about how intensely quiet it was made me want to fill the empty space with new sounds.
The album ends in an abrupt and incredibly powerful state of harmonic discontent; that last chord feels like it’s been sucked into a black hole, and I’m left feeling like as though the record has trailed off mid-sentence. Why did you decide to end the album in this way?
I have an affinity for cinematic moments like that. You know, sometimes you’re watching a really intense, dramatic scene in a film and they’ll suddenly cut to something that feels more calm…well, I try to translate those kinds of contrasts into music. That song “Scrape” is written from the perspective of a woman having surgery for a disease that stems from a past unhealthy relationship, so she’s forced to lay still in this clinical, white room but her mind is raging, full of memories and anger.
What records have you been listening to recently?
The Wardruna Runaljod trilogy. I’ve just asked for them on vinyl for my birthday from a dear one so I look forward to listening to them in that form soon!
What else is on the horizon for you?
I’m already working on my next album, and I’m slowly turning my garage into a recording space!
Musician Chelsea Wolfe has long been known for dark, metal-tinged songs as heard on her previous albums Pain Is Beauty and Abyss, but on the excellent Hiss Spun (out Sept. 22 on Sargent House), she embraces a sound heavier than anything she’s done before. Here, she premieres the new Hiss Spun track “Offering” and explains how California’s Salton Sea served as inspiration for the song.
When you released “Vex” last month, you talked about how it was inspired by “a mysterious hum [that] resounds in the deep sea for about an hour.” How would you describe “Offering?"
I’ve always written these sort of psychedelic love songs to nature, and I use a lot of natural imagery and symbolism, and it’s present on this album as well. There are lines like “the hum of low sea” from "Vex” and “the kettle is wheeling” [from “The Culling”], which refers to the way that vultures circle around prey or roadkill. “Offering” is written from the perspective of the Salton Sea in southern California. I’ve always been intrigued by this place. You get out of the car and the smell of the place is almost visceral. It really leaves this kind of physical impression on you but it’s still really beautiful. It’s this strange resort anomaly to see in the middle of the desert. I wrote this song imagining the Salton Sea as this female character, and writing from her perspective. She’s this wonderful resort but she couldn’t keep up — the world wanted too much from her and eventually she started to wilt, becoming poisonous and toxic to the point where everyone abandoned her. The Salton Sea sits right on the San Andreas Fault and late last year, there was a swarm of almost 200 earthquakesdirectly beneath it over a couple days. That’s what caught my attention again because I haven’t visited there in many years so I wrote the song after that. It’s a really strange place. When you walk along the shore, you’re basically walking on the skeletons of fish.
When did you start working on this album?
It’s probably been a couple of years in the making. My process is to write continually, and once I feel like a group of songs is coming together sonically or thematically, then I’ll hone in and focus on creating a new album. Sometime in early 2016, I really started focusing in and finishing songs. This album kind of began as a side project, strangely enough. I have a friend, Jess Gowrie, who’s now my drummer. We used to have a band together about 10 years ago and when I left that band, we didn’t talk for a period of seven years. We reunited on New Year’s Day of 2015, and as soon as we started hanging out again, it was clear that our musical chemistry was not finished, and we really wanted to write songs together. So I started to write songs with her, and then we invited my bandmate Ben Chisholm and Troy Van Leeuwen from Queens of the Stone Age to play on it as well. Once a few of those songs came together, we were really digging them, and it felt like a shame to not be able to play those live, so eventually those songs became this new album.
