PRINCESS OF DARKNESS AND V GIRL CHELSEA WOLFE IS SHARING SOME OF THE INTIMATE, CANDID, BEHIND-THE-SCENES, MOMENTS FROM HER RECENTLY COMPLETED NORTH AMERICAN TOUR. SHE’S NOT DONE YET, THOUGH. STARTING AGAIN THIS HALLOWEEN (HOW APPROPRIATE) AND CONTINUING THROUGH NOVEMBER, SHE’S TAKING EUROPE BY STORM. CLICK THE TOUR DIARY, SNAPPED BY NICK FANCHER, ABOVE, AND CHECK OUT HER FORTHCOMING TOUR DATES, BELOW
Oct 30 – Cologne, DE @ CBE – SOLD OUT Oct 31 – Brussels, BE @ Ancienne Belgique w/ Low Nov 02 – Hamburg, DE @ Knust ** Nov 03 – Gothenburg, SE @ Pustervik ** Nov 04 – Oslo, NO @ Blä ** Nov 05 – Stockholm, SE @ Slakthuset ** Nov 06 – Copenhagen, DK @ Loppen ** – SOLD OUT Nov 07 – Hannover, DE @ Café Glocksee ** Nov 08 – Leipzig, DE @ UT Connewitz ** Nov 10 – Warsaw, PL @ Proxima ** Nov 11 – Poznan, PL @ Blue Note ** Nov 12 – Berlin, DE @ SO36 ** Nov 13 – Prague, CZ @ Dobeska ** Nov 14 – Budapest, HU @ A38 w/ A Place To Bury Strangers ** Nov 15 – Vienna, AT @ Arena ** Nov 17 – Yverdon-Les-Bains, CH @ L’Amalgame ** Nov 18 – Paris, FR @ La Maroquinerie ** – SOLD OUT Nov 19 – Metz, FR @ Les Trinitaires ** Nov 20 – Utrecht, NL @ Le Guess Who Nov 21 – Kortrijk, BE @ Sonic City Festival – SOLD OUT Nov 22 – London, UK @ Islington Assembly Hall ** – SOLD OUT Nov 24 – Leeds, UK @ Brudenell Social Club Nov 25 – Dublin, IRE @ Button Factory Nov 27 – Prestatyn, UK @ ATP: Nightmare Before Christmas Nov 28 – Brighton, UK @ Mutations Festival Nov 29 – Bristol, UK @ The Fleece Nov 30 – London, UK @ Bush Hall w/Dylan Carlson of Earth
From the dark recesses of “immeasurable spaces,” comes Abyss, the eighth studio album from Chelsea Wolfe. In “Carrion Flowers,” the LP’s lead track, an airy voice floats atop jaded bass and heavy kicks, paving the feeling of an electrocuted war march. “Growing from repeated crimes / the afterglow in full bloom,” she demands. The power of unanswered questions, reality, and human sadness, Wolfe says, are the places from which she creates—”these things have always haunted me.”
What were your artistic references when making Abyss?
For the album artwork, my initial inspiration was something very well known, Henry Fuseli’s painting “The Nightmare.” I remembered that this great young painter Henrik Uldalen had reached out to me the year before to work together, but his work really resonated with the themes of Abyss.. The subjects in his paintings are floating in blank space or disintegrating. I sent him photos to reference and he painted the cover. The other photos and video were taken by my bandmate Ben Chisholm, near where I live in the mountains and around California. That made it feel more personal.
What’s behind the name?
Early on in putting this album together I wrote the song “The Abyss.” I knew I was going to dive really deep into myself and into some dark places for this album, so that song was a sort of reminder not to lose myself in all that darkness. The word ABYSS stood out to me so much after that though, graphically/visually, but also the multiple meanings behind it: an immeasurable or infinite space, deep ocean, chaos before creation. The album was built from there.
What’s your favorite moment on the record?
When Ezra [Buchla] screamed into his viola pickup for the end of “Iron Moon,” in key. He used to do that live sometimes when we toured Europe together and I always loved it. In the studio I asked him if he would do it for that song and he immediately did. Luckily John [Congleton] was recording. Everyone in the room was stunned or crying. Even thinking about it now makes me emotional. I’ve learned a lot from Ezra.
Do you prefer the studio or the road?
One state of being balances out the other. I love writing and recording the most, but I also have amazing experiences on the road. A lot of lyrics come to me while I’m on tour. Something about the long drives really helps me understand and articulate ideas.
Who do you think is making the most interesting music today?
I love Alessandro Cortini’s stuff, Werner Herzog soundtracks, Kendrick Lamar.
What’s your dream bill?
I’d love to open for Nine Inch Nails or Tool. Playing with Queens of the Stone Age was dreamy, I adore those guys and have loved their music for many years.
Why do you make music?
The power of unanswered questions, reality, human sadness—these things have always haunted me. I started by writing poems but was introduced to music and recording through my father who was in a country band when I was a kid. I found that I could set my words to music quite naturally, and I’ve never stopped writing and recording music since.
What is your WILD Wish?
I wish empathy, patience and kindness were equally important to humanity as wealth, power, or fame.
We are thrilled that Dylan Carlson of Earth will be joining us for our recently announced second London show at Bush Hall.
Chelsea Wolfe begins her EU tour in two weeks, and tickets are very close to selling out throughout Europe. Be sure to buy your tickets now if you want to see Abyss live – get them HERE. A full list of dates is below.
CHELSEA WOLFE EU TOUR 2015
Oct 30 – SOLD OUT – Cologne, DE @ CBE Oct 31 – Brussels, BE @ Ancienne Belgique w/ Low Nov 02 – Hamburg, DE @ Knust ** Nov 03 – Gothenburg, SE @ Pustervik ** Nov 04 – Oslo, NO @ Blä ** Nov 05 – Stockholm, SE @ Slakthuset ** – SOLD OUT Nov 06 – Copenhagen, DK @ Loppen ** – SOLD OUT Nov 07 – Hannover, DE @ Café Glocksee ** Nov 08 – Leipzig, DE @ UT Connewitz ** Nov 10 – Warsaw, PL @ Proxima ** Nov 11 – Poznan, PL @ Blue Note ** Nov 12 – Berlin, DE @ Lido ** Nov 13 – Prague, CZ @ Dobeska ** Nov 14 – Budapest, HU @ A38 w/ A Place To Bury Strangers ** Nov 15 – Vienna, AT @ Arena ** Nov 17 – Yverdon-Les-Bains, CH @ L’Amalgame ** Nov 18 – SOLD OUT – Paris, FR @ La Maroquinerie ** Nov 19 – Metz, FR @ Les Trinitaires ** Nov 21 – SOLD OUT – Kortrijk, BE @ Sonic City Festival Nov 22 – SOLD OUT – London, UK @ Islington Assembly Hall ** Nov 24 – Leeds, UK @ Brudenell Social Club Nov 25 – Dublin, IRE @ Button Factory Nov 27 – Prestatyn, UK @ ATP: Nightmare Before Christmas Nov 29 – Bristol, UK @ The Fleece – SOLD OUT Nov 30 – London, UK @ Bush Hall w/Dylan Carlson of Earth – SOLD OUT
I first met the singer Chelsea Wolfe at an understatedly swank, dimly lit bar in downtown Los Angeles a year ago. The place looked newly minted and was completely empty. Over drinks and small bites Wolfe and her collaborator Ben Chisholm, talked about their work and life in the desert (they recently moved outside of LA). Wolfe’s forth studio album, “Pain Is Beauty,” came out the year before. It was well received by critics and has found her a new audience. Unrelenting, Wolfe was already working on a new album, “Abyss.”
We kept in touch as Wolfe recorded and finally reunited when she was in New York on the Abyss tour. We spent the first day shooting in Brooklyn’s Red Hook; the next day we met in the lobby of her decidedly unglamorous Brooklyn hotel.
“Abyss” might be Wolfe’s most challenging record yet. While “Pain Is Beauty” was dark, it was not hard to digest. The distortion was kept to a palatable level and the vibrant percussion and strings gave the album energy without it sounding assaulting.
On some songs on the new album, however, the guitar distortion tests the listener’s endurance. It recalled The Swans finest moments of aural limit pushing, and I was not surprised to learn that the album was produced by John Congleton, who has worked with The Swans in the past. Wolfe confessed that even she was not sure she did the right thing when she heard the final version of the record.
And yet, virtually all music that I have come to love is difficult; it has both attractive and repulsive qualities. After taking the time to internalize the difficult parts of a particular album that would become a favorite, I would come to love it that much more. With repeated listenings of “Abyss” (accompanied by murder threats from those I’ve subjected to it in my car and in my house), the record’s intricacies have slowly appeared like an image that gradually takes shape on photographic paper.
The central unifying force of Wolfe’s music is her stunning voice that can reach significant depths. It is routinely described as “haunting,” as is Wolfe’s music, but this moniker, as does pigeonholing Wolfe as “goth,” misses something more significant and relevant – a kind of strength that is essential to Wolfe’s body of work that has to do with acknowledging the world’s dark side without wallowing in it or distorting it to comic-strip fantasy levels.
Undoubtedly, Wolfe’s subject matter is for the most part bleak. “Pain Is Beauty,” dealt with natural disasters and “Abyss” with people in her life that had committed suicide. “I just tend to be drawn to characters and situations that are based in reality, but they happen to be on the heavier side,” Wolfe told me.
“I really think it’s something that’s always been there with me,” she continued. “Even when I started writing poems as a kid, they were on the dark side. One of the first poems I remember writing was because I heard an ambulance go by, and it clicked with me that that it is going to help someone who’s probably just had a car accident and was on the ground bleeding. I was putting all these connections together and realizing that it really wasn’t just my life, but I was part of this greater world, where so many different things are happening all at the same time. Sometimes, I think if you could hear all of the sounds in the world, all the laughter and all of the crying, and all of the voices at the same time, it would just be so totally overwhelming. That’s always been an inspiration.”
As the flip side of darkness is light, so it is with Wolfe. “I think I’m an idealist at heart, and I’d like to believe that people can be good,” she said. “I write a lot about overcoming things and fighting on. That’s important, too, to not give in to the darkness. I try and be an idealist most of the time, but the world just drags you right back down.”
Wolfe began making music when she was a kid. Her father was in a band and had a home studio where Wolfe got to tinker when she visited him on weekends after her parents divorced. She started writing poetry when she was six, and her child dream was to become a poet, until it dawned on her that she could put words to music. Wolfe asked her father to teach her how to use the Tascam 8-track and a Casio keyboard he had, and she began making songs. She also taught herself to play the guitar and her music output became consistent.
But Wolfe’s biggest obstacle to sharing her deeply personal music was her shyness. “When it came to showing my music to people, I just never felt it was good enough,” she said. Gradually, Wolfe’s friends and family convinced her to play in public. At first, stage fright got the better of her. Even though Wolfe recorded an album in her early 20s, she did not feel it was good enough and canned the record. Wolfe took a break from music until the performance artist Steve Vanoni invited her to be the resident musician on a performance artist tour in Europe. She quit her job and left. She was 24.
On that tour Wolfe found encouragement for the first time. “People who are into performance art are usually very open and accepting of anything, so I felt like I could just be myself,” she said. “So I just tested out songs. Sometimes I did acoustics; sometimes I would borrow an electric guitar and some pedals, and I would sing through pedals and experiment otherwise. That really guided my sound and I felt like I had finally found the way I like to sing.”
Upon returning home Wolfe immediately began working on her first album, “The Grime and the Glow,” which she released in December of 2010. Since, then, Wolfe’s rise in popularity has been steady in her comparatively short music career.
Wolfe’s band has also had an influence on the style of “Abyss.” She began her career appearing on stage solo, but having a band gave her a new range of possibilities. “I want to maximize the fact that I have this great band,” Wolfe said. “I really want to write and play heavy songs, so I kind of ditched the more minimal songs I’ve been writing and started focusing on the heavier stuff, heavier guitars. Obviously, subject-wise it’s pretty heavy, too, so that kind of guided it. A lot of the initial inspiration for the new record being heavier was knowing that I was going to continue to tour, and I wanted to have songs that would translate well live. It can be enjoyable to do the acoustic stuff, too, but I’ve done an acoustic tour before. Last year, opening for the Eels, I had a really hard time with it. I didn’t feel like I was ready to be up there alone in that quiet state, so I started gearing towards the heavier stuff, mostly for the live set.”
The next night I attended Wolfe’s concert at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, and I got to see exactly what she was talking about. The live band gave new musical meaning to the album. Wolfe’s formidable vocal range, Ben Chisholm’s prolific guitar and keyboard skills, and the awe-inspiring percussion of Dylan Fujioka left the audience in thrall.
Another reason for having a band is that it takes attention off of Wolfe on stage. Even though she has gotten over her stage fright, Wolfe feels more comfortable sharing the stage, despite remaining its centerpiece. And while she likes touring, in the ideal world she would rather stay at home and make music.
“I really have to prepare myself to go on tour: mentally, physically, and emotionally,” Wolfe told me. “Even just packing, finding the right things because you can’t bring your whole life on tour, so you have to pair it down to a favorite group of outfits and things like that.”
“But then when I’m out on the road I’m kind of okay with it. The van becomes your home. The venues become your home. You just sort of roll with the punches and it starts to become a really cool routine. You get to go to a new city everyday and meet new people everyday. It’s mostly when we get tired that we don’t like touring. There are weeks where you don’t get any sleep and everyone starts to bare their teeth a little bit.”
Wolfe’s style is the direct extension of her music and her personality. She works closely with her stylist Jenni Hensler, who makes custom pieces for Wolfe, which she mixes with designer fashion. Unsurprisingly, she counts the cerebral, rock-n-roll influenced designers like Ann Demeulemeester, Rick Owens, A.F. Vandevorst, Yohji Yamamoto, and Martin Margiela among her favorites.
Her fascination with style partly came out of her initial stage fright and the desire to hide herself, to simultaneously be present and absent. “At first I was so nervous to even get on stage that my tactic to deal with it was to wear long, black dresses. I wore a lace black veil on stage for the first three years, because I really couldn’t handle the fact that I was up in front of everyone with all these eyes looking.”
She still picks clothes that make her feel protected. “When you’re a performer you really have to put yourself together and make yourself strong in order to go out there on stage and let yourself fall apart. Because if you’re uncomfortable in the first place, you are not going to have a good show, and you are not going to really let yourself go and give yourself to the audience. But if you feel protected by that Ann Demeulemeester jacket, you’re going to have a really good show.”
The evolution of Chelsea Wolfe has been a marvel to behold. On her first two records, the genuinely terrifying The Grime and the Glow and Apokalypsis, she sang like someone trapped in a snowstorm, her panicked, desperate vocals rising up from a blinding cloud of hypnotic guitars and funereal percussion. To listen to them felt like eavesdropping on a bleak, late-night Ouija board session, strange messages from the beyond rattling through a foreboding haze of sound. Her shows at the time mirrored that distinctly occult mood — she took the stage adorned in snaking, high-priestess headdresses, and each performance felt like a ritual, secret and forbidding.
She’s gradually, purposefully refined her approach since then. On the recent Abyss, one of the year’s best rock records, her melodies have become more focused and deliberate; she’s traded the amorphous haze of guitars for the pummeling, deep-set howl of doom metal, the perfect contrast to her voice. The net effect is just as chilling as her early work, but feels more dire and more severe. If Wolfe used to feel like the conduit for sinister spirits, on Abyss she feels like the conjurer, no longer passively allowing evil to overtake her but, instead, willing it into effect.
All of that dark energy was on display over the course of her riveting performance at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on September 9, where Wolfe felt not so much like a singer but a medium, powerfully commanding the unreal into existence. Gorgeously grim opener “Carrion Flowers” descended like a dark cloud, bone-rattling guitars colliding over and over as Wolfe’s voice — high, gorgeous, and unholy — strode majestically between. “Dragged Out” was eerier still, protracted and lurching, great heaves of sound stopping suddenly for Wolfe to howl in the silence between them. And during the death-march dirge “We Hit a Wall,” Wolfe draped her voice like gauze over the spidery chords, making the song’s message of romantic desolation feel like an Old Testament curse.
photo by Jason Speakman
That transformation is one of Wolfe’s greatest gifts. Her songs deal primarily with heartbreak, desertion, and loneliness, but her agonized voice makes each sound less like an obstacle and more like a curse, impossible to avoid, paralyzing in its effect. By conflating the emotional with the supernatural, Wolfe manages to burrow down deep into the core of what makes longing and sadness so crippling. Registering them simply as feelings renders them simple and almost trite; by affording them a kind of spiritual power, Wolfe makes them feel both more devastating and more real. During “Maw” she wailed repeatedly, “Where are you? Where are you?” as suffocating guitars closed in around her, and the panic in her voice was unnerving. On “Mer,” the disconsolate opening track from Apokalypsis, sinewy fingers of guitar seemed to strangle Wolfe’s bereft voice. She sang its opening phrases — “Hollow courtship/Creeping, endless, timeless, wasted” — like she was delivering last rites, emotionless and resigned.
Fittingly, the show was short on formalities. Wolfe never addressed the crowd, save a few brief words of thanks, and there was no jocular banter between bandmates. Instead, they moved with solemnity from one song to the next, each seeming more brutal and cutting than the last. At the end of the night came “Pale on Pale,” a harrowing number about death in which Wolfe is at her most explicitly morbid. “When the light in your eyes goes out for the last time,” she sighed, “when your body is swollen with blood.” She never completed the thought. Instead, she stepped away from the microphone and clawed out a series of ominous, imposing chords. Gradually, the sound grew, the lights went down, and the stage filled with smoke, and Wolfe receded into the background, alone with her demons, embattled but frighteningly alive.
The video for “Carrion Flowers,” a shivering dirge that opens Chelsea Wolfe’s recently released fourth album, Abyss, like the beast slouching towards Bethlehem, is nightmarish. Black oil leaks out of tree bark, Wolfe’s eyes and mouth crackle with white lightning, and the camera pans over abandoned farmhouses lit from behind as though by a nuclear mushroom cloud. It’s not hard to believe such hair-raising images came from the California-born and -bred musician, who has suffered much of her life from sleep paralysis, a terrifying condition in which the mind half-wakes up — often hallucinating shadowy figures left over from the previous night’s slumber — while the body remains immovable. But when she’s presented with this potential connection, Wolfe very politely says that’s not the case at all, actually. In fact, she says, “I almost asked my friend, who wrote the bio, to take out that out of the finished version” — for fear that journalists (such as this one) would latch onto it.
Now that she’s living by herself about 90 minutes north of Los Angeles’ madding crowds of automobiles and the golden-limbed people who drive them, Wolfe’s sleep has settled, along with the rest of her life. With the massive, misty woods of Northern California standing between the 31-year-old and the city she used to call home — and with a nearby biker bar to hang at when she wants to watch TV or enjoy the company of other locals — she’s started writing again, but this time in a separate room rather than in her bed, and without a population of ten million people to distract her. Sipping on a Moscow mule at downtown L.A. watering hole Tony’s Bar, close to her former practice space, Wolfe tells me thatAbyss was also recorded outside city limits, at the studio of producer John Congleton (Angel Olsen, Lower Dens) in Dallas, Texas last year.
“Usually we’re a pretty self-produced band,” she says in an email exchange later. “We work out demos and parts well before we step into the studio, and it was no different this time, but we wanted to bring in an outside influence for this record and John was on our mind already. So when he reached out to us, it felt something like fate. It was important to me to keep this album raw and heavy, and John pushed it even further in that direction.”
The decision to smolder even more fiercely than on her previous albums was also partially inspired by Wolfe’s stint on tour last spring opening for Eels, following her 2012 album, Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs. “[Performing] was really hard for me,” says Wolfe, who has always struggled with stage fright, an affliction she used to mediate by wearing veils and other cloth coverings onstage. At one point she recalls crying while sitting onstage, strumming her guitar in the spotlight, because she was feeling so vulnerable without her usual wall of noise. After that, she thought “f—k it,” and invited the rest of her band to join her for the next performance, the lot of them screeching loud enough to rattle a dungeon’s iron bars. The Sacramento native swathes herself in protective layers of sound for two reasons: to keep at bay her terror at singing in front of a live audience; and to shield her from the emotions of those around her, which affect her so much she believes that’s why she’s been having such trouble sleeping.
By this point her stage fright is mostly a thing of the past, although she admits her fascination with fashion “can be a form of armor on the road, for sure,” she emails me later. Wolfe is partial to dark fabrics and lipstick and horsehair bracelets so long they touch the ground. “The ritual of getting dressed for a show is important. You start to get centered and focused on what you’re there for and it always helps if you’re wearing something that is special to you or makes you feel good,” she writes. As for her other great struggle, even as she shies away from the notion that her sleep paralysis is the axis around which her new album revolves, Wolfe has written verses that nonetheless read quite personal: “I’m so tired, I’m so tired / Dragged out in the weather / Dragged out in the madness / Dragged out in your loneliness” on “Dragged Out” would seem to refer to the effects of severely disrupted slumber. It’s a ways from how she started playing music nearly two decades ago, with her two sisters, each of them pretending to be famous singers in front of a Camcorder with names that started with Z — aliases she conveniently can’t remember now. “That’s a scoop,” she says, laughing. Since then Wolfe has been intermittently taking voice lessons (“I should probably be doing it more regularly,” she admits), honing her howl so that now it purrs and gasps mellifluously, giving even more emotional heft to her songs.
Mostly, though, she’s still focused on telling others’ stories. “Color of Blood,” which smokes at its edges as a deep, rattling hum of guitar feedback burns throughout, is a cover of fellow Angeleno and doom-y singer-songwriter Jesse K. Phillips’ “Arteries,” a Swans-like odyssey he released in 2014. “I gave it new lyrics and melody the first time I heard it, then asked him to let me cover it,” says Wolfe. “I’m glad he obliged. I love the feeling of the song and it was important for me to include it.” Elsewhere on Abyss, she tackles news items: The ocean floor-dredging riffs on “Iron Moon” are nearly as painful as the suicidal thoughts plaguing the real-life factory worker on which the song is based, much as 2013’s“The Waves Have Come” was inspired by the Japanese tsunami two years prior. “The world is pretty f—ked up and sometimes I’m trying to confront it and sometimes I’m trying to escape from it, giving stories an alternate, more idealistic ending,” she says.
Looking out over the Los Angeles “River” — a cement pipeline with a trickle of water where movie scenes are often filmed — she points out her old studio, a large building with big, empty panes of glass in the windows that glint in the setting sun. “That’s my old practice space,” she says, nodding and squinting behind her sunglasses. “Yep. That’s about all there is to it.” So we watch a car chase being filmed in the man-made ravine below us, egging on the stunt driver popping wheelies over and over again. “This place is actually pretty cool,” she admits. But nostalgia is fleeting, and tomorrow she’ll head back up north, where solitude among her guitars, potential future songs, and a good night’s sleep awaits.
Issue 1406 of CMJ features none other than Chelsea Wolfe on the cover, as Abyss is the most added album in college radio!
You can order your copy on her online store HERE, and see her on her US and EU tours this fall – multiple shows have already sold out, so don’t wait! Click HERE for a full list of dates and ticket links.
Click HERE to see a list of reviews about the album.
Chelsea Wolfe may be known for her unique brand of “doom-drenched folk,” but her music taste spans generations and genres, as proven by her deep, abiding love of Aaliyah. Hot off the release of the critically-acclaimed, definitively metal-drenched Abyss, the singer also sat down with us for a brief chit-chat about exploring her sleep paralysis, her anxiety and a few of her favorite songs. Read our Q&A below.
I know you mentioned this album was inspired by your experiences with sleep paralysis, what was that like? How did it play into the writing of this album? Sleep paralysis for me comes in the form of shadow figures.. I wake up but the figures from my dreams are still in the room around me. It’s given me a lot of anxiety/paranoia over the years – it’s an intense way to wake up – but I never really addressed it before. For this album I was interested in exploring the subconscious and experimenting with dreams.
How did you start songwriting? Was there a particular experience you had that compelled you to start? Like listening to one of these artists you’ve included, for example. I grew up listening to my dad play guitar and sing harmonies in his country band. He had a home studio where they’d practice and record. As a kid I wanted to record my own songs so he set me up with an 8-track. My sisters would sing backup. The vibe of those earliest songs was like, Aaliyah meets Fleetwood Mac – what I was listening to mixed with what my parents were listening to. “Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number” was my favorite song then. Anyway, I was always writing and recording from a young age, and I never stopped.. It just took me a long time to get to the point of sharing my music and playing shows.
Each of your albums seem to tackle a distinct sort of subgenre of sound, what direction do you think is next? I have some ideas in mind, but I usually let the songs guide me, so we’ll see.
You also made us a playlist of some of your favorite songs, and I think can hear a lot of Abyss in here. If you could pick one stand-out song that best represents the vision you had while making this album what would it be and why. That Vladimir Vysotsky song, and specifically that performance of it, is something to aspire to. I relate to the seriousness of it all. I wanted Abyss to have moments of vulnerability and rawness in it. I had to let myself become a little broken.
Can you walk us through each track you picked. What special significance do they hold for you?
“Poppies” by Buffy Sainte-Marie: A friend in high school bought the “Illuminations” record because she was intrigued by the cover photo. I don’t remember listening to it back then, but the album cover stuck in my head. I re-discovered her a few years back and felt a kinship, especially with “Poppies.”
“Capricious Horses” by Vladimir Vysotsky: Thankful to whoever turned me on to him. I’m obsessed with this video.
Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number by Aaliyah: My earliest songs as a kid were influenced by Aaliyah.
My Middle Name is the Blues by Abner Jay: His songs and melodies are so beautiful, descriptive and heavy.
S:H:S by True Widow: One of the best bands around. Best friends too. Their music can put you in a trance.
“Living here feels a bit like The Walking Dead,” says Chelsea Wolfe.
The 31-year-old artist moved to the mountains north of Los Angeles to record her latest album, Abyss. She wanted out of the city, and thirsted for a place that was quiet, desolate and surrounded by nature.
She set up shop up in a big empty barn, recorded her demos, and never left the area. In fact, she can’t imagine herself living in a city ever again. She now lives nestled in a blend of high desert and green mountains and is at peace with her decision, especially since she can finally sleep.
Wolfe, whose trademark music blends drone, metal and folk, has suffered from bouts of sleep paralysis since she was a child – an experience which created the basis of her new album. The 11 tracks are strung together to make the listener feel like she’s diving head first into her nightmares, only to re-emerge gasping for air and take the plunge again.
Wolfe wanted to capture that specific feeling of waking up briefly, and falling back asleep into the same dream state (the end of the album’s eponymous song, a full minute and a half of strings punctuated by piano, evoke someone finally losing their mind).
Sleep paralysis – a transitional state between wakefulness and sleep – affects people differently: some awake only to find it impossible to move a muscle, some see apparitions – grim reapers, ghosts or demonic figures. Others have terrifying auditory hallucinations: a presence clawing at their door, or an entity whispering threats in their ear.
I asked Wolfe about how the condition affected her. She described it as “waking up, and you can move your body and your eyes are open, but there are figures and people from your dreams still present in the room”.
While artists and writers throughout history have referred to the phenomenon as “the stranger”, Wolfe calls it “shadow figures”, for it’s how they appeared to her, slowly making their way towards her bed in the dark. At times, the apparitions were so real that she lashed out, and even grabbed a knife. “It’s an instant adrenaline rush at four in the morning, so it’s really strange,” she says. Worst of all, the feeling often lingered, creeping into her day, not leaving her side.
Living far away from the city, with all its noises and lights, has helped greatly. These days, she merely has recurring dreams – almost always a “life or death type of situation”.
With Abyss, Wolfe had carte blanche in the artwork department (she says Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare was her inspiration for the cover). This freedom might explain why her entire output – from her studio music to her live shows, album covers and outfit choices – make sense taken as a whole. So to echo the dark corners of Abyss, Wolfe stripped things back, wearing mostly black and utilitarian clothing.
It wasn’t always this way. When she first started performing live in her hometown, she found herself intensely nervous. One day, as she was scheduled to play a small show at a bookshop, she found that she couldn’t do it. Filled with angst and wondering how she was ever going to perform, she remembered the image of women in a Victorian funeral procession, dressed in long black garments that hid them from view.
She cut a veil out of an old lace skirt, and walked on stage wearing it. It worked. “I found that in a really childlike way, it helped me to feel more free, like if they couldn’t see me I couldn’t see them. So I stuck with the veil for a while, but eventually realized I wanted to be more brave, and started making eye contact with the crowd,” she recalls. This need to make her art public, countered by her intense need for solitude, has always followed her. “My entire life is a dichotomy,” she says.
For her last few releases, she explored clothing and fashion differently, using it “almost as armor, to feel stronger”. Dressing for a show felt like a calming ritual. It’s an art she takes pride in, and says she has learned a lot from the greats: David Bowie, Nina Simone, even The White Stripes. It’s what separates her output from singers, and puts her squarely in the “artist” category: her art is all encompassing, it inhabits her. Her live performances, her clothes, her Instagram: it is carefully curated and highly coherent.
Right now, Wolfe is getting ready to embark on a US tour starting at the end of the month, followed by Europe in October. Away from her cocoon in the California mountains, let’s hope slumber will come easily to her this time around.
