Statuesque and striking, Chelsea Wolfe has only a violinist and keyboard player for company. She instantly captivates with an opening salvo of ethereal folk numbers from her current album, Unknown Rooms: A Collection Of Acoustic Songs. Her graceful voice both heals and devastates on the dark, haunting ‘Flatlands’ and ‘Boyfriend’.
She trades acoustic guitar for electric, returning with an axe-man and drummer for the second half of the performance, made up almost exclusively of tracks from 2011’s Apokalypsis LP. Huge walls of sound are slowly constructed, with elements of drone-metal, noise and blues drowning out Wolfe’s folkie timbre. The deafening climax of ‘Pale On Pale’ is drenched in reverb and enormous, swelling vocal loops. She’ll need a bigger venue next time.
It’s a miserable, grey evening in Dublin, but a gig at the Sugar Club is always somewhat of a transporting experience. While the light drizzle is altogether souring, there’s just something about the darkness and plush comfort of the Leeson St venue that easily shuts out such menial annoyances. With the right performer, it can become cocoon-like and suitably intense. Chelsea Wolfe, the ethereal Sacremento singer-songwriter with a lingering gothic sensibility, is such a performer, but until she comes on stage, Simon Bird will provide some blustering background listening.
Wolfe strides into view, wearing an ankle-length black skirt and a long-sleeved white top. She’s markedly slender and her face is largely covered by a mop of raven hair. With no drummer, she’s only accompanied by a violinist and a keyboardist/bassist. A small band will suffice for now as the set’s opening half takes solely from Wolfe’s 2012 album Unknown Rooms, a collection of acoustic songs that constitutes her most refined and affecting work to date.
The opening strains of ‘Appalachia’ usher the set into life and slowly gather momentum. At this point, everyone has found their spot to sit or stand and ended their conversations. Attention needs to be paid when a performer is so willfully quiet, but such reticence only focuses the audience’s attention. ‘Spinning Centers’ [sic] is the sound of the big bad wolf beckoning naive children deeper and deeper into the forest, which is appropriate, as Wolfe and her two backing musicians have that same creeping magnetism and eerie charisma.
It’s hypnotic at times, and the wonderful one-two punch of ‘Flatlands’ and ‘Boyfriend’ is truly flooring. The former is very simple in construction but undeniably effective in execution and builds with gloomy inevitability towards its spine-tingling chorus. You wonder why songs like ‘Flatlands’ haven’t been around forever; they just seem so obviously great that it seems stupid that nobody wrote them sooner. ‘Boyfriend’ does a great job of following-up, however, and never once lets go of a captivated audience, but shakes loose of acoustic limitations with a boggy, plodding keyboard line at its end. With that and a brief, violin-led interlude, Wolfe and co. exit.
A full band returns without that bewitching violinist, unfortunately, and the set’s second half is far more raw, taking from Wolfe’s first two albums, Apokalypsis and The Grime and the Glow. Although the second half may be more sternum-shattering in its intentions, it by and large fails to match the impact made by the first. Sure, the drummer makes his presence known on ‘Demons’, but it is not until the raucous ‘Moses’ that brute force prove as indelible in their breathless impact as earlier peaks.
‘Movie Screen’ is wispy and meandering allowing everyone a few minutes to breath before the finale, ‘Pale on Pale’, which matches ‘Moses’ for volume and aggression, adding its own disorientating intensity. It’s over suddenly and a focused atmosphere dissipates in an instant as some move to front to converse with Wolfe and her band. Meeting a musician tends to rid them of any enduring mystique they might have, replacing perceptions with an actual person while generally highlighting their on-stage ability. Wolfe is polite and humbled in person and anything but on stage.
Chelsea Wolfe’s European headline tour begins this Wednesday April 24th in Dublin her first time playing in Ireland. For this tour she has brought along her Violin player and will be performing a combination of both acoustic and electric songs (new and old) for these very special shows.
CHELSEA WOLFE EU 2013 Apr 24, 2013 – Dublin, Ireland @ The Sugar Club Apr 25, 2013 – Belfast, N. Ireland @ Auntie Annie’s Porterhouse Apr 27, 2013 – Praha, Czech Republic @ Lucerna Music Bar Apr 28, 2013 – Berlin, Germany @ Kantine am Berghine Apr 29, 2013 – København, Denmark @ Vega Apr 30, 2013 – Stockholm, Sweden @ Debaser Medis May 02, 2013 – Oslo, Norway @ Bla May 03, 2013 – Lund, Sweden @ Mejeriet May 04, 2013 – Hamburg, Germany @ Uebel & Gefährlich May 05, 2013 – Aachen, Germany @ Musikbunker Aachen May 06, 2013 – Antwerp, Belgium @ Trix May 07, 2013 – Paris, France @ Le Point Ephemere May 08, 2013 – Diksmuide, Belgium @ 4AD May 09, 2013 – London,UK @ Cargo May 10, 2013 – Leeds, UK @ The Cockpit May 11, 2013 – Glasgow, UK @ King Tuts Wah Wah Hut May 12, 2013 – Manchester, UK @ The Deaf Institute May 13, 2013 – Utrecht, Netherlands @ Tivoli May 14, 2013 – Arnhem, Netherlands @ Willemeen May 16, 2013 – Zürich, Switzerland @ Bogen F May 17, 2013 – Milan, Italy @ Lo Fi Club May 18, 2013 – St Petersburg, Russia @ Skif Festival May 19, 2013 – Moscow, Russia @ 16 Tons Club
The Work Magazine is honored to present one of our favorite artists, Chelsea Wolfe, as the debut highlight in our “Sound Check” series. Here we capture an intimate portrait of this great talent as she prepares to take the stage at The First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles.
Chelsea Wolfe’s European headline tour begins next week in Dublin. She will be combining her sets of acoustic and electric songs for these very special shows. All show dates below, including an appearance at Desert Daze Festival this weekend.
Apr 20, 2013 – Mecca, CA @ Desert Daze Festival
CHELSEA WOLFE EU 2013 Apr 24, 2013 – Dublin, Ireland @ The Sugar Club Apr 25, 2013 – Belfast, N. Ireland @ Auntie Annie’s Porterhouse Apr 27, 2013 – Praha, Czech Republic @ Lucerna Music Bar Apr 28, 2013 – Berlin, Germany @ Kantine am Berghine Apr 29, 2013 – København, Denmark @ Vega Apr 30, 2013 – Stockholm, Sweden @ Debaser Medis May 02, 2013 – Oslo, Norway @ Bla May 03, 2013 – Lund, Sweden @ Mejeriet May 04, 2013 – Hamburg, Germany @ Uebel & Gefährlich May 05, 2013 – Aachen, Germany @ Autonomes Zentrum Aachen May 06, 2013 – Antwerp, Belgium @ Trix May 07, 2013 – Paris, France @ Le Point Ephemere May 08, 2013 – Diksmuide, Belgium @ 4AD May 09, 2013 – London,UK @ Cargo May 10, 2013 – Leeds, UK @ The Cockpit May 11, 2013 – Glasgow, UK @ King Tuts Wah Wah Hut May 12, 2013 – Manchester, UK @ The Deaf Institute May 13, 2013 – Utrecht, Netherlands @ Tivoli May 14, 2013 – Arnhem, Netherlands @ Willemeen May 16, 2013 – Zürich, Switzerland @ Bogen F May 17, 2013 – Milan, Italy @ Lo Fi Club May 18, 2013 – St Petersburg, Russia @ Skif Festival May 19, 2013 – Moscow, Russia @ 16 Tons Club
Jun 13, 2013 – Brooklyn, NY@ Warsaw – Northside Music Fest w/ Swans
“Sargent House takes great care of their bands and is really supportive of art so I feel lucky to be a part of it.”
About to embark on a European Tour, with two dates in Ireland, Chelsea Wolfe is not the kind of sound one expects to associate with a label like Sargent House. Playing host to Irish acts like Adebisi Shank and And So I Watch You From Afar, among other considerably heavier sounding international artists.
Wolfe’s latest offering, the nine-song “Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs” is her clearest emergence from the veil and shadows that obscured her earlier work. As the album’s subtitle promises, it’s stark, but also in tune with her gothic sound; she’s accompanied by viola, violin, piano and analog synths. Her voice still conjures warped mirrors and molten candle wax, even when resounding in a room alone.
Describing it herself, Wolfe looks upon her own sound as bipolar or as having multiple personalities. “I don’t like to stick to one genre and I like to experiment. I’m interested in contrasting reality and something more arcane… Death is something that haunts me, as a character and concept, so the subject makes its way into a lot of my music.”
“Unknown Rooms” is a far cry from what we can expect from Chelsea Wolfe in the coming year when Wolfe will deliver her fourth album, which will expand upon the acoustic record’s themes. The new full-length will mark a significant change as Wolfe and Chisholm (who makes glitched goth-soul as Revelator) bring more electronic elements into the fold
“It was a way for us to bring together a lot of unreleased acoustic songs and while we did that I ended up writing new acoustic songs so they all live together on that album.”
Shifting herself from Northern California down to LA hasn’t changed her outlook on music though, influences aren’t based on location for Wolfe, but life experiences. “Living in LA has allowed me more time and space and energy to work on my music, but my influences come from the same place as when I lived in Northern California. Life, death, love, nature, cinema, books.”
Visually Chelsea Wolfe is known for her artwork and consistently updated website where her image considerably changes. “I work with a photographer (an old friend) named Kristin Cofer a lot (photo above by her). We’ve worked together for so many years that now we’re just comfortable experimenting and trying out ideas with photos and visuals.”
Whether she brings these visuals across in her live set is yet to be seen but the photos she associates with her music tell a story as much as her lyricism. A concept found on the cover of her acoustic album, a narrative found throughout her career. “For the ‘Unknown Rooms’ cover we rented a room at an old sort of abandoned hotel in the bay area of California that used to be a brothel. Each room is named after a different woman who used to live and work there and it feels very full (sic) of energy and stories. Chelsea Wolfe plays the Sugar Club on April 24th as part of her European Tour.
The photographs available of American singer/songwriter Chelsea Wolfe are hugely varied, but all seem to obscure her in some way. They’re akin to peering through a window into an unlit room, her pale face inconspicuous behind mourning veils, half-hidden beneath snakelike tendrils of black hair, or just blurry portraits of an arcane figure. Her sound is equally as nebulous and difficult to define. It’s folk, but with the pathos and epodic slant of a troubled soul. It would seem that Wolfe dwells rather a lot on death.
Following her debut album The Grime & The Glow and 2011 follow-up Apokalypsis, a particularly excellent performance at Roadburn festival gathered her fans from across various styles of metal. Black metal in particular feels like an obvious reference point, though admittedly that’s more to do with its misty and chilly atmospheres than its walls of caustic distorton. Wolfe’s supernatural songs are redolent of isolated pine forests, half-light percolating through tree canopies, and the malodor of rotten petiole. They suggest that death is just as lonely as we feared – yet their ghostly traces hint towards the way that our selves endure through the memories of others around us.
To coincide with the release of her Latitudes session Prayer For The Unborn, the Quietus spoke with Wolfe about haunted keyboards, photography and yes, mortality.
Could you tell me about the concept of your recent Latitudes recording?
Chelsea Wolfe: I had this character of a housemate for a while who would camp out in the living room playing records for days. Nothing usually caught my ear, but one day I was walking through and heard Rudimentary Peni and it stopped me in my tracks – I listened and was so drawn to the energy behind that voice. The roommate told me about the band as they were one of his favorites – even his cat was named Blinky, after Nick Blinko. I couldn’t find a lot of their music online but I found lyrics and read all of them. I was haunted by Rudimentary Peni for days, weeks, until I finally was possessed fully one night and sat down to record five sort of covers of their songs, just based on the lyrics. They’re interpretations really, more than covers, since they don’t sound like the original songs and I hadn’t heard all of the songs I covered at the time.
I put those recordings on the internet for a while, and then when my UK/Europe tour was booked last spring, Southern Recordings in London asked if I wanted to come and do a session for a Latitudes release. I decided to re-work the Peni covers with my band and we recorded them with Harvey Birrell at Southern. I didn’t realise until that day that Harvey had actually recorded many of Rudimentary Peni’s albums! Strange fate. We had a really great time making this album – one of my favorite projects so far.
I really feel like your music works as a soundtrack to photograph by people like Nan Goldin and Diane Arbus – there seems to be something undefinable and ‘other’ about your sound. Do you have any visual representations you try to evoke with your music?
CW: Thank you – that’s a high compliment in my eyes. I have always adored the work of artists like Nan Goldin, who can take ordinary sadness and turn it into lasting beauty. I try to approach music as a slow-motion painting… something lush and cinematic, but grounded. I admire Werner Herzog and Lars von Trier for this quality to their films. Film and photography and painting and literature are the things I find most inspiring for my songs.
Your sound seems to be transiently slipping through genres, ghost-like and intangible – doom, drone, black metal, gothic, folk and dark ambient could all legitimately be used to describe it. It’s a prosaic question, but is it important to you that people interpret your music in a certain way?
CW: I’ve come to a point where I’m comfortable with and happy to have people interpret my music in their own way. I appreciate it when folks understand my music and relate to it and find it useful or helpful in their own realm. It’s an honour. I think a song can mean a million different things depending on the listener’s personal life experience. I do have a hard time sticking to one genre, and honestly I prefer it that way. I’d rather be free to experiment and make the kind of art I want to make than be easy to define.
Your personal aesthetic and artwork are incredibly expressive, specific and seem relevant to your work. Where do you derive your inspiration for these visual aspects?
CW: Again, it’s a lot of experimentation and following an idea. In my life I’ve ended up with some good friends who are also great photographers so I’ve been lucky to play around with them and see what works and what we can come up with. I get inspiration from designers, from films, from nature. For my live show I typically keep things minimal. I want it to be more about the energy of the music and the visuals in the person’s mind when they close their eyes.
Do you believe in the supernatural? Have you ever seen a ghost?
CW: I’ve only had one encounter with a “ghost” or spirit.. When I was a kid I had this keyboard piano that you could record songs into. It had spaces for three songs. On the first space I had recorded a simple piano pattern. I have never been very good at piano, nobody in my life was, it was just a simple repeated four-note pattern. On the second space I recorded a beat and some ocean sounds or something funny. The third space was open for a long time until I finally came home from school one day with an idea. I checked that third space to make sure I hadn’t forgotten about something I had recorded. I was surprised to hear the four-note pattern from the first track playing slowly, then dropping into a dark and beautiful piece based on those four notes, finally returning back to my pattern. It was far too lovely to be a glitch. I recorded it into my handheld recorder and eventually converted it into an mp3 so I still have it. Appropriately, at the time of this occurrence my backyard was basically a graveyard. We had a small yard which looked into the largest cemetery in my town. Overhearing funerals was a daily occurrence.
Your lyrics are arcane, insightful and ultimately very personal. What informs them?
CW: Since I was a kid, I knew that I understood sadness in a certain way, and that I could interpret that into words and songs. I was always drawn to brutal honesty in music, to stark reality and yet also beautiful, lush, idealism and even mysticism. Seeking out the truth and being very honest about it I suppose brings my music to a very personal place, but often my lyrics have nothing to do with my own life, they’re more about creating a world or telling a story.
You sometimes wear a mourning veil onstage or your face is obscured by your hair! Is there a certain element of exposure to playing live that you feel uncomfortable with?
CW: I haven’t worn the veil for a couple years now, but yes, there is definitely an aspect of live performance that I’m not comfortable with. I sometimes wish there were no cameras at concerts. I wish people could just be there with me without trying to capture it for others to see. When I see a camera pointed at my during a show I get distracted, so yeah, I usually try to make eye contact with people who are listening or cover my face with my hair so I can keep focused on the song.
The veil started out as an experiment in visuals; expressing a sense of mourning or funeral marches. But then I realised it really helped me separate myself from the fact that I was performing. It was a very child-like thing to do I suppose, like covering my face would make it so nobody could see me! But while I’ve always felt comfortable and natural as a singer and songwriter and person who records music, live performance is a different challenge. The reason it took me so many years to become a serious musician is because for a long I didn’t believe I could be someone who could be a performer, someone people looked to and listened to in that kind of setting. It’s still strange, but I accept it as part of my job and an extension of the recordings, so I do my best to lose myself in the songs and give all of myself to the audience.
Why do you push your voice through distortion on your recordings?
CW: I like the idea of a voice being pushed through machines and electricity. I’ve always loved white noise, and my favorite pedal to sing through is this really fucked up old digital reverb that has these long, drawn-out moments of unexplainable noise. It feels like a haunting. I sometimes experiment with clean vocals and also enjoy that feeling of in-the-same-room intimacy, but I often think of the voice as another instrument and so run it through pedals and loops, just like I would with an electric guitar.
A personal question – ‘Halfsleeper’ is one of my all time favourite songs, it makes me cry, and it also frightens me. When I’m by myself sometimes I have to skip it, it calls up a feeling like when I was small and the wind in the trees used to scare me. What’s it about?
CW: Death is a subject that many of my songs explore, probably because I haven’t experienced it much myself and so I became obsessed with it. I was introduced to Death as a character in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and reading Sylvia Plath poems. The line “death is the dress she wears” is a line that always stood out to me. ‘Halfsleeper’ is about dying in a car accident with a loved one. I wrote it after seeing some particularly brutal and colorful roadkill by the freeway on a bright day. So much of our lives consists of driving and sleeping. When you die everything petty becomes unimportant, and love is what remains.
Chelsea Wolfe’s European headline tour is now announced in full. She will be combining her sets of acoustic and electric songs for these very special shows, she will also be playing Russia and Ireland for the first time. Before leaving California she will play at this year’s Desert Daze Festival out in Mecca, CA on April 20th. Upon her return to the States she will be flying in to New York for a special show with Swans for the Northside Music Festival on June 13th.
CHELSEA WOLFE EU 2013 Apr 24, 2013 – Dublin, Ireland @ The Sugar Club Apr 25, 2013 – Belfast, N. Ireland @ Auntie Annie’s Porterhouse Apr 27, 2013 – Praha, Czech Republic @ Lucerna Music Bar Apr 28, 2013 – Berlin, Germany @ Kantine am Berghine Apr 29, 2013 – København, Denmark @ Vega Apr 30, 2013 – Stockholm, Sweden @ Debaser Medis May 02, 2013 – Oslo, Norway @ Bla May 03, 2013 – Lund, Sweden @ Mejeriet May 04, 2013 – Hamburg, Germany @ Uebel & Gefährlich May 05, 2013 – Aachen, Germany @ Autonomes Zentrum May 06, 2013 – Antwerp, Belgium @ Trix May 07, 2013 – Paris, France @ Le Point Ephemere May 08, 2013 – Diksmuide, Belgium @ 4AD May 09, 2013 – London,UK @ Cargo May 10, 2013 – Leeds, UK @ The Cockpit May 11, 2013 – Glasgow, UK @ King Tuts Wah Wah Hut May 12, 2013 – Manchester, UK @ The Deaf Institute May 13, 2013 – Utrecht, Netherlands @ Tivoli May 14, 2013 – Arnhem, Netherlands @ Willemeen May 16, 2013 – Zürich, Switzerland @ Bogen F May 17, 2013 – Milan, Italy @ Lo Fi Club May 18, 2013 – St Petersburg, Russia @ Skif Festival May 19, 2013 – Moscow, Russia @ 16 Tons Club
