photo by Nick Fancher

Chelsea Wolfe has been winning high praise for her music since her label debut album The Grime And The Glow blended surreal goth imagery and shoe-gazing textures with angular, experimental guitar work. Her follow-up album, the stunning Apokalypsis showed that Wolfe was no one-trick pony, and since then each of her 3 further albums have developed in style and vision. Her most recent album, Abyss, is a staggering piece of art that cements the artist as a legend on the underground music scene.

Ahead of her performance at this week’s FYF festival in Los Angeles, CA, ARTISTdirect caught up with Chelsea to discuss the artists world view, her most recent project, and the half-written songs just waiting to be a next album.

Where in the world are you right now?

Prague. I fall in love with this city more and more each time. Just ended a short European tour, played a few festivals. Here’s a picture I took from my hotel window early this morning when I couldn’t sleep, and here’s a picture I took yesterday of a gravestone angel at the Vyšehrad cemetery, final resting place of Alphonse Mucha.

photo by Kristen Cofer

Tell us about your new project: Who did you work with? Where was it recorded? What’s it about? Is there candy?

CW: My latest full length album is called Abyss and I released it about a year ago. I wrote it with my bandmate Ben Chisholm and then we brought in Ezra Buchla (viola), Mike Sullivan (of Russian Circles, guitar) and Dylan Fujioka (drums) to add layers and new feelings to the songs. I spent a month in Dallas recording it with John Congleton at his studio there.

It’s about the mind as a deep abyss – dropping into your own dreams and memories, sleep paralysis, and pushing forward while someone or something tries to drag you backwards, down into a dark well. The album cover was painted by artist Henrik Uldaalen and it represents my experiences with sleep paralysis. There are THC chocolates in the candy dish over there.

How do you describe your music to new friends?

It depends on what incarnation of my band I’m touring with. Sometimes I’ll say rock n roll, sometimes folk or acoustic, sometimes experimental. “What kind of music do you play?” is most often asked by a TSA agent at airport security as they x-ray my guitar. They’ll ask, “Are you going to play a tune for us?”

Other than Chelsea Wolfe, what should your hometown be known for?

CW: Sacramento is well-known for many weird, dark, interesting bands like Deftones, The Cramps, Death Grips, Trash Talk. My favorite band is Screature and Sacramento should definitely be known for them.

Please look around you right now and please describe the first item or person you see that’s significant to you (and that your relationship with it/them).

My Starcaster on the hotel bed… It’s a hollow body Fender guitar that I was magnetically drawn to when I first saw it.

What first inspired you to pursue music? If it was a musician or a specific piece of music, please tell us all about why you find it so inspirational…

It was a combination of sounds and situation and realizing that I could put the emotions they caused into words. I started writing poems at a young age, 6 or 7, and started setting them to music by age 9.

My father had a band and a home studio. He taught me how to make beats on a Casio keyboard and record my voice and from then on I never stopped. The sounds became words and the words became songs.

What’s the best advice anyone has given you about pursuing a life in music?

After age 30, don’t drink cheap alcohol. More importantly, when you’re on stage, own the stage. Don’t hold back for anyone else’s sake. Josh Homme told me that.

What song best sums up your life right now?

“Of Ice and Movement” Gorgoroth

What is the best reaction to your music you have experienced so far?

In Moscow a girl was yelling, “your soul is my soul” throughout the show – kind of intense, but I thought it was very poetic and genuine.

Take a moment to dream – Where do hope to be a year from now?

Working on a new album, feeling free and in the throes of it.

What’s your next step towards that dream?

Taking some time off from touring to clear my head and finish half-written songs.

(via ARTISTdirect)

Chelsea Wolfe recently performed a live session for CBC’s The Strombo Show, and that video is up now. Watch it above for three specially selected songs and Q&As about her album Abyss.

Chelsea Wolfe and her band travel to Europe soon for festival appearances before returning to Los Angeles for FYF Fest and a special performance with The Echo Society. A list of those shows can be found below, tickets and info available HERE.

CHELSEA WOLFE LIVE 2016

Aug 10 – Jaromer, CZ @ Brutal Assault Festival
Aug 11 – Goteborg, SE @ Way Out West Festival
Aug 13 – Le Locle, CH @ Rock Altitude Festival
Aug 14 – Castellina Marittima, IT @ MusicaW Festival
Aug 16 – Vienna, AU @ Arena w/King Dude

Aug 28 – Los Angeles, CA @ FYF Festival
Aug 31 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo Society: V at Ace Hotel

The fourth episode of Chelsea Wolfe’s monthly RBMA Radio show will stream at 6pm EDT / 3pm PDT. This episode is named DROPT, filled with songs to make you nod your head, look inward, and reflect. It will feature tracks from Tricky, Flying Lotus, Broadcast, Saul Williams, Anika, and more.

Listen to DROPT here.

Chelsea Wolfe has a cover feature in the July/August 2016 issue of Totally Gothenburg magazine discussing her latest music and her appearance at Way Out West festival.

Read the magazine online HERE.

Chelsea Wolfe and her band will be performing at several EU festivals this August along with a show in Vienna with King Dude. She then returns to the US for FYF Fest and a special just-announced show with the Echo Society in Los Angeles where she will be collaborating with a composer on music written specifically for that concert.

See a full list of currently announced dates below. Tickets and info available HERE.

Aug 10-13 Jaromer, CZ @ Brutal Assault official
Aug 11-13 Goteborg, SE @ Way Out West
Aug 13 Le Locle, CH @ Rock Altitude Festival
Aug 14 Castellina Marittima, IT @ MusicaW Festival
Aug 16 Vienna, AU @ Arena w/ King Dude

Aug 28 Los Angeles, CA @ FYF Fest
Aug 31 Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo Society: V at Ace Hotel w/ The Echo Society, Clark, The Haxan Cloak, & Ted Hearne

The third episode of Chelsea Wolfe’s monthly RBMA Radio show will stream at 6pm EDT. This episode’s is called Tung and is focused on heavy music, with songs from SunnO)), Neurosis, Russian Circles, Converge, Deafheaven, Helms Alee, and more.

Listen to Tung HERE.

All Photos and text by Bobby Cochran

Los Angeles-based Chelsea Wolfe makes a style of music that’s hard to pin down, ranging from eerie folk, to dark electronic, to dirgy doom metal, and everything in between.  Though it’s diversity, it maintains a thread of continuity that defines it as uniquely her own.  Possessed of one of the most beautiful singing voices in music today, Chelsea can make even the darkest music sound like a lullaby.  Live, she delivers all her songs with a slight divergence from the recorded form, performing everything with a heavier edge and slight re-arrangements to suit the bands that accompany her.  Seeing her perform at The Chapel in SF, a relatively small venue for such an established artist, was a special treat. Its size was, I imagine, the primary reason for her two-night stint there.

For this tour, Chelsea Wolfe delighted audiences with renditions of older, less-performed songs from her albums Apokalypsis and Unknown Rooms, in addition to tracks from her two most recent albums.  Opening with the driving rhythmical track “Demons,” then three of the best tracks off Abyss (“Carrion Flowers,” “Dragged Out” and “After The Fall”), the audience’s delight was almost palpable when she played three songs from Apokalypsis, (“Mer,” “Tracks (Tall Bodies),” and “Movie Screen.”  The latter song’s looped vocal intro was performed so delicately, so quietly, there wasn’t a glass clanked or word spoken in the whole house.  Performing these songs with her current band lent a weight to them that pushed their emotion further and deeper.  Heaviness and gorgeousness combined flawlessly.  As someone who’s been fortunate enough to see Chelsea live a number of times, it was a treat to see her interacting with the audience more, at one point kneeling down and swaying at the front of the stage as she performed “House Of Metal.”  There’d been word online about Chelsea having to cancel previous dates on this tour due to vocal strain, but there was nothing in her performance that indicated any weakness or flaw in that department.  Pitch perfect, as always. Set closer “Survive” was a culminating moment of grandeur, droning and building into the chaotic finale, echoing feedback and distortion, fading as the band exited the stage.

The dual encores of “Hypnos” and “Halfsleeper” were beyond delightful… the latter having not been performed live in years, and the former being an example of a song that’s so good, it’s easy to understand why it was released as a single well after the release of Abyss.  Both songs exist as delicate acoustic masterpieces on the original recordings, and again, played live they had a heft and weight to them that propelled them into a new sonic arena, more powerful and darker then ever.

In all the times I’ve seen Chelsea Wolfe, she’s always accompanied by a different set of musicians, performing a diverse range of songs from her growing catalog.  Tonight’s show was a powerful mix of new and old, stitched together in a parade of enchanting musical moments, performed to perfection.

See more photos of Chelsea Wolfe at CVLT Nation

On April 1, Chelsea Wolfe released a seven-inch single for “Hypnos,“ a song that invokes the name of the Greek personification of sleep. It was written as a kind of ode, a love song, that Wolfe says is set in a dark dream. This is the way that Wolfe comes to terms with her own struggles with sleep issues and dreams, sometimes manifested as sleep paralysis. In writing new material, Wolfe revisited older methods of creating her music, which has been described as "drone-metal-art-folk.”

“I started out in music years ago just recording my voice and guitar and life samples on my eight-track, and deep down, I still love the sound of those recordings the best,” Wolfe says. “I think they’re just very intimate in how crude they are, and there’s a lot of one-take stuff there, too. The ‘Hypnos’ demo was a sort of return to that style. I sent it to my friend Steven [Ellison, Flying Lotus], and he was like, ‘Just release this version!’ I didn’t really want to redo it, either, but for this album, I made an effort to try and record things hi-fi while still keeping an intimate feeling. I was living in a shitty hotel off the highway for a month in Dallas and spent my days at John Congleton’s studio working on the recordings. The energy of the whole situation lent itself to raw emotions, feeling kind of broken down and giving everything I had to the songs.”

The video for “Hypnos” is Wolfe’s most haunting and symbolically rich visual representation of her work to date. It is reminiscent of the films The Ringand Videodrome. It’s grainy, with distorted visuals – like watching a long-lost supernatural classic on an old television set getting a weak signal from a television station far away. The prominent imagery of the snake as a symbol for the unconscious mind, ancient spiritual traditions and looking at life outside the cycle of time, represented by the Ouroboros, gives the video a kind of mythological dimension, rendering it a sort of Jungian horror noir.

“That video came about after photographers Kristin Cofer and Muted Fawn asked me to do a photo shoot with them,” reveals Wolfe. “I had been wanting to do something with the snakes I had in my 2011 music video for ‘Mer’ with Zev Deans, so I contacted the rescue center again and organized for them to bring some snakes to the shoot to hang with. Once Sargent House and I decided to release the extra Abyss recordings of ‘Hypnos’ [seven-inch with] ‘Flame’ as a B-side, I figured we might as well use the opportunity of the photo shoot to take some video footage for the release as well. I envisioned something really minimal: a dark dream, focusing on the snakes’ movement against skin, and having them represent a lover or child. But then my friend and hairstylist for the shoot, Ericka Verrett’s husband, Ricky, came and surprised us with a bunch of old cameras, TVs and video feedback equipment and offered to set that up, so we just tried it out, and it added an extra layer of strangeness that I fell in love with while editing the video with Ben Chisholm. We also used some footage that Jenni Hensler, Kristin Cofer and I had taken together in the past year that felt related. I guided the video, for sure, but it was a big collaboration between lots of artists and friends in the end.”

(via Westword)

Chelsea Wolfe is currently touring North America with A Dead Forest Index – see all remaining shows and find tickets HERE

The second episode of Chelsea Wolfe’s monthly RBMA Radio show goes live today at 6pm EDT. This month’s show is focused on Soundtrack Songs, including songs and scores by Can, Fever Ray, Johnny Greenwood, Air, and more.

Listen to the second episode HERE.

photo by Nico Turner

When Chelsea Wolfe writes a record she goes deep. So deep in fact, she reaches a level of personal intimacy and darkness most of us wouldn’t dare to explore, but all know exists. That’s why we have her albums to do the diving for us and bring back the sonic depiction of her findings. On her fifth studio album, Abyss, her most evolved and personal record to date she does just that.

“I wanted to drop deep into my own mind approaching things I hasn’t faced before,” she said. “Sonically, I wanted to reflect the hazy confusion of a dream or the afterlife, the feeling of not knowing whether you’re asleep or awake, and the intensity of the surreal world we live in.”

On record, Wolfe explores the warped world between sleep and awake through her atmospheric vocals, which alternate between delicate and commanding, while ripping through walls of guitar fuzz across a haunting synth landscape built for Wolfe transcends through.  On standout track, “Iron Moon,” this is most clear as she pulls us into calm waters and then throws us into a crashing sonic wave owning her audience like the moon owns the tides.

“I wanted to make sure [Iron Moon] had the right balance of intimacy and heaviness,” Wolfe said. “This song helps represent the album for as a whole for me—with its ups and downs, it’s like trying to wake up from a dream you’re trapped in.”

When it comes to playing the album live, Wolfe allows the songs to evolve into a reincarnation of themselves on each unique stage and night.

“Playing the songs live, they take on a new life,” she said. “We didn’t play any of the songs from Abyss until after they were recorded and they’ve already changed a lot as we’ve been touring. Some songs have become more distorted and loud, some have become more subdued and restrained.  Sometimes it depends on the venue, the night, or just the mood. We recently played two nights in a row in New York. The Williamsburg night felt very raw and emotional.  The next night at Bowery Ballroom was very reverent and quiet. Both shows felt special for their own reasons.”

(via Black Book)