Carla Bozulich - Redeemed by Music

Drugs, prostitution, beatings, hardship of every kind. Stories that could belong to a Gus Van Sant film or a J.T. Leroy novel. And as often happens in these cases, music becomes the last foothold for redeeming an existence lived constantly on a razor's edge. Carla Bozulich carries this baggage of ordeals and suffering with her: in her not-always-even tone of voice, in her nervous, almost feline movements, and even in her physical appearance, certainly "lived-in". All of this betrays a personal path of a certain kind, yet one that has been decisive in shaping her art. An art that has changed radically over the years. From the cyber-industrial beginnings with Ethyl Meatplow, to the country-punk of the phenomenal Geraldine Fibbers, passing through the Scarnella interlude with ex-husband Nels Cline, up to her solo albums, not to mention her work as a video artist.

A maudit wanderer between New York and Los Angeles, an adventurous life and a restless spirit, a singular innovator and a tireless non-conformist, Carla Bozulich is a larger-than-life figure outside of any mold; fragile, moody, as genuine as few other artists on today's international scene. And with a voice that is always in direct contact with the soul.

To Hell and Back

Born in New York in 1965, Carla Bozulich grew up in Greenwich Village, in a family split between literature and jazz. She then moved to California, to San Pedro. At 13 she left her parents and began a long period of wandering, between music and excess. Her first appearance on record dates back to 1982, on Gary Kail's "Zurich 1916"; with bands like Neon Veins and Invisible Chains she recorded her first studio tracks. But her life became an ordeal.

At twenty she is a prostitute, desperately chasing money to shoot heroin. A bottomless abyss of violence, degradation, pain.

Then, as in fairy tales, a boy falls in love with her and decides to save her. He takes her to a rehab center and gives her Mahler's symphonies. A revelation.

"I love my stupid life. This I learned from Mahler, that beauty and horror follow one another and mix eternally, without sense and without purpose. Until all of this comes to an end," she would later recount.

The scars of that ordeal remain, branded in blood onto her music.

Singer, guitarist, performer and video artist, struck onto the path of rock by Patti Smith's "Gloria", Carla Bozulich began her real career with Ethyl Meatplow, a Los Angeles industrial combo led by John Napier.

Happy Days, Sweetheart (1993) – produced by Barry Adamson (Magazine, Nick Cave), who also brought in some bizarre string and horn arrangements – becomes a minor cult favourite among fans, mixing ambient-techno pulses, rap inflections, noise, obsessive sampling and "pop-bop" vocal harmonies (Napier's crooning owes a debt to Fred Schneider of the B-52's). The brazen sexual ode of "Queenie" is the single that fuels the underground legend.

A few months later, though, the page is already turning: with the previous project disbanded (Napier would go on to form first Buccinator, then E.coli), Bozulich joins the survivors of a punk band (Glue) and merges into Geraldine Fibbers, a quintet devoted to a singular reworking of American country tradition.

Carla Bozulich is the fiery frontgirl of a lineup that includes guitarist Daniel Keenan, bassist William Tutton, violinist Jessy Greene and drummer Kevin Fitzgerald.

Signed by Sympathy for the Record, Geraldine Fibbers debut with the EP Get Thee Gone (1994).

A raw portrait of Los Angeles suburbia, the record drips with horror and desolation over a multifaceted country-punk rhythm, swinging between slide-guitar languor and outright cacophonous collapse. The title track, punctuated by Fitzgerald's banjo twang, pairs jolting guitar with the singer's litany, delivered in a dark register reminiscent of Nick Cave (“I emptied out your bag of toys/ And let them spin their web/ But oddly, as I watch them turn/ My love begins to ebb”), while the folk-rock ballad "Outside Of Town" drifts into almost Celtic territory.

There are two covers: "Jolene" (Dolly Parton) and "The Grand Tour" (Canned Heat). But what really launches the band's neo-traditional country sound are the martial stride of "Marmalade" and the dirge-like "Blue Cross", a tribute from rising star Beck, who picks up an acoustic guitar for a spine-tingling duet with Bozulich.

Geraldine Fibbers make enough noise to catch the attention of a major label, Virgin, who sign them for their debut full-length.

The gamble of Lost Somewhere Between The Earth And My Home (1995) is to turn the ancestral legends of roots-rock into horror-tinged snapshots of life on the margins of society, with a distinctly urban flavour. As if the Velvet Underground were tearing apart the classics of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

What emerges are tales of rustic desolation, of love and wreckage, always balanced between country melodicism (Greene's violin and viola) and punk roughness (Keenan's guitar distortion). Bozulich's performances move along that same double track too, her androgynous delivery vibrating à la Patti Smith, swinging between intimate confession and acid-tongued invective, as on the single "Dragon Lady", a hushed country psalm that erupts into a noise-rock bacchanal worthy of (the best) Hole. A sense of tragedy hangs over it all, of imminent apocalypse, often sharply at odds with the bucolic character of the instrumentation.

The album gathers the band's best previously released tracks alongside a handful of new ones. "Lilybelle" is country-western epos, with a whirling maelstrom of guitars, violins and cymbals. The storm returns on "Small Song", with a violin skittering wildly. These are gut-wrenching confessions, at times almost autobiographical, as on "A Song About Walls", where a past of abuse and despair comes back to life (“She loved her junkie boyfriend/ Tried to help his heart mend/ Asshole with an appetite/ Living under an elevator shaft can be cold at night…/ Yeah, he died with a needle in his eye/ But she was clean, clean, clean”). But there's also room for homages to Appalachian roots, as on the more radiant "House Is Falling", or in the electric waltz of "French Song", scarred, however, by a stinging viola.

Lost Somewhere Between The Earth And My Home is a country orchestra caught in the middle of a circle of hell. An ambitious record, confused in places, but one that effectively forges a new genre, of no small importance to the development of the Nineties.

Meanwhile, to keep the cult alive, Virgin releases a live album (Live From The Bottom Of The Hill), while Sympathy for the Record pads out the debut EP into What Part of Get Thee Gone Don't You Understand? (1996).

Meeting Cline

With new guitarist Nels Cline (future member of Wilco and Bozulich's husband), Geraldine Fibbers swerve toward the even more eclectic rock of Butch (1997). Paradoxically, the record sounds both more experimental and more catchy at the same time. The opener "California Tuffy", for instance, boasts an almost catchy-pop hook, with a sweeping surf guitar and martial riffs à la Gun Club; the bitter ballad "Swim Back To Me" retains an engaging appeal, while "Toy Box" is a tumultuous ride that projects Patti Smith's hallucinated fervour into the grunge era.

But, as mentioned, the band's avant-garde streak also finds fresh momentum. The chamber-rock of "Arrow Through My Drunken Eye" is a descent into the hell of child abuse, with Bozulich's chanting propped up by the sinister tones of cello, viola, celeste and acoustic bass. An almost speed-metal guitar loop and amphetamine-fuelled drumming set fire to the bacchanal of "I Killed The Cuckoo", while "The Dwarf Song" settles into melodrama, with an almost goth-like gloom.

The debt to kraut-rock and Can is settled with a cover of “You Doo Right,” while the oblique instrumentals of “Claudine” and the closing “Heliotrope” confirm the ensemble's wealth of resources. The link to their early country roots, meanwhile, is kept alive by the western-shuffle of “Folks Like Me,” buoyed by a heartfelt performance from Bozulich backed by Greene's violin and Cline's lap steel, and by the lovely Appalachian waltz of “Pet Angel,” where the initial idyll curdles into a murder ballad. But the emotional peak of the record is “Trashman in Furs,” where a play of reverb between electric and acoustic bass underscores a trembling requiem dedicated to Jim Reva, a former dancer with Ethyl Meatplow who died of AIDS (“Death is a spinster, mortally whacking the funny boys 'til they're not laughing anymore”).

At the height of their glory, however, the Geraldine Fibbers' story comes to an early end.

What doesn't end, though, is the partnership between Bozulich and Cline, who, after a couple of joint live sets, join forces in Scarnella (an anagram of “Carla e Nels”), an open, experimental and often purely instrumental project.

Scarnella (Smells Like, 1998) is a prelude to Bozulich's personal vision of a rock ensemble (somewhere between a chamber formation and an eccentric post-rock line-up, built on customised sound sources including tape recorders and tapes in place of electroacoustic sources, loop devices, organ and distortion pedals used in all sorts of ways). Clearly transitional, it's a solemn passage that unfolds in intermediate stages, an excellent testing ground for Bozulich's voice, itself caught mid-transformation from frontwoman to the arcane author she'd become in the 2000s: a singer of existential anguish (and, before long, mystical-religious anguish too), as much witch as shaman, as much cursed preacher as heartfelt worshipper.

The album opens with a one-two punch that betrays the same influence: “Underdog” is a deathly (funereal) crescendo-accelerando reworking of the Velvet-esque “Heroin,” while — conversely — “Release The Spring” is a tempered (bittersweet) decrescendo-decelerando reworking of the Velvet-esque “Black Angel's Death Song.”

The lengthy “Snowy” ventures an expressionist incursion built on a mezzo-piano mass of drone and assorted noise events, before retreating placidly into a slow, hushed blues, almost like an inert “Cortez The Killer” (albeit lifted by magmatic guitar unisons in the style of Glenn Branca).

“Dandelions” even anticipates the emo-core revival of a few years later (though soured by electro collage at the start), and “The Most Useless Thing” recalls the most despondent Cave (with chansonnier-style guitars standing in for piano), grafting onto it a long instrumental break full of psychedelic topoi. “Death By Nortwest,” one of the album's emotional high points, finally lets Bozulich's shrieks erupt after a swarm of guitar experiments that turn from murky to ethereal, amid pulsing, again Velvet-esque suspensions. “Millennium Fever Ballad,” the humblest track, is a folk-rock song for voice and acoustic guitar with faint echoes of Tim Buckley, closing with a minute and a half of layered, distorted, reverb-soaked chatter.

The main course, though, is the three daring “Improvisation” pieces (though “#3” and “#4” are simple free-form experiments on guitar sound), culminating in the long “#1” (15 minutes). It kicks off with a kind of industrial music box, which mutates into an obsessive, deformed loop of distortion and echo effects. A refrain rises out of the drone labyrinth, followed by a feedback scream, and then everything liquefies as the refrain turns into a hard-rock riff, until a maelstrom of radiation steals the scene in the improvisation's closing moments.

Nels Cline's contribution, as phantasmagoric and subliminal as it is (perhaps even sly), once again spells out Bozulich's solo manifesto: bending academic techniques and instinctive methods, fusing them together and extrapolating from them an innovative compositional model (as much song-form as improvised suite, if not the perfect hybrid of the two); but the project is still concerned with their (bold) juxtaposition, rather than any exclusive synthesis.

Also thanks to Cline, Bozulich makes contact with musicians from the free-jazz, post-rock, alt-country and other scenes. And it's in the early 2000s that she (re)discovers herself as a rock artist of real potential. She starts out tentatively, with an album of reworked standards by country legend Willie Nelson (Red Headed Stranger, 2003), and continues with a live project captured on I'm Gonna Stop Killing (2004), another step — this time a more significant one — towards defining her new sound.

Meanwhile, Bozulich also makes the video for the single “California Tuffy,” her first experience as a videomaker, which would later lead her to present her “By Hook Or By Crook” in the official selections of the 2002 Sundance Festival. Among her other collaborations is one with Devo drummer Devo's Dave Kendrick, with Camper Van Beethoven's Victor Krummenacher, and with Lydia Lunch, with whom she recorded some vocal pieces. Her recent work also includes the Fake Party, which she describes as what happens when “a new kind of music dressed up for a party meets a social event disguised as art” (the fake parties are performances that play with the architecture of party venues).

Landing in Canada

Canada's Constellation is a special label. Not just for its roster, packed with stars of the post-rock, electronic, avant-garde and new-folk scenes, but also for its foresight in unearthing new or overlooked talent. In 2004 it was Elizabeth Anka Vajagic and her extraordinary debut “Stand With The Stillness Of This Day.” Two years later, the new breakthrough is none other than the relaunch of Carla Bozulich's career.

Evangelista (2006) is the New York artist's solo debut proper, as well as the first record cut for Montreal's legendary label by a non-Canadian artist. It's a fiercely personal collection of psychotic existential martyrdoms and harshly free playing, of vocal contortions intensified by the most savage suffering, of arcane mystical visions amplified by electrified instrumentation, distortion pedals, tape, raw electroacoustics, string ensemble and organ.

It's a gothic blues, with guitar arpeggios trailing off into the void, with the organ painting scenes of utter apocryphal sacredness. An intensity that envelops and hypnotises. Imagine a Nico at the height of inner anguish, chanting over the slow, austere textures of Crime & The City Solution, with Constellation's sound palette in the background and the odd abstract brushstroke in the manner of the great Supreme Dicks.

The interplay between Carla's vocal lead and the instrumental counterpart is perfect, and the latter is far from a minor presence in the overall economy of the sound — so much so that, voice aside, one could extract from it an excellent post-rock album (members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, A Silver Mt. Zion and Black Ox Orkestar, among others, lend a hand). But it's Bozulich's bleeding delivery that makes the difference, starting with the title track, almost 10 minutes of thorns that flay the flesh, screams and despair. Masterful in its constant alternation of stasis and acceleration, nervous tension and release, a climax that keeps rising until it implodes, never finding an outlet.

"Pissing", a cover of Low from their latest "The Great Destroyer", is skilfully reprised in all its "pop" splendor, yet made incandescent by a tail of searingly acidic feedback. But every track here is steeped in dramatic tension. It becomes almost exhausting to listen through the moments of agitation, when, through some kind of psychological transference, the artist's pain seems to pour straight onto the listener. Take "Baby That's The Creeps", for instance, with its church-like flow, shattered by the protagonist's self-destructive delirium, so searing that it stirs up mental associations with death drives.

A (great) record of tears and blood, one that sends the Bozulich phenomenon exploding into the indie firmament.

A successful tour through America and Europe follows, with a string of gripping performances, halfway between a musical show and avant-garde theatre. The music, as in Evangelista, is almost always imploded. There seems to be a clear disconnect between Bozulich and her musicians, who go along with her shifts by working on climax and atmosphere, only to then suddenly abandon her to her fate of screams and thrashing.

The need for support from a backing band takes full shape in a new project. Evangelista, as the far-from-casual moniker goes, definitively resurrects her as a shamanic singer-songwriter capable of coagulating and setting ablaze sounds and instruments until they take on starkly expressionist contours with very few precedents (perhaps only Diamanda Galas and early Cave).

Hello, Voyager (2008), the debut of this newborn project but effectively another Carla Bozulich solo album (as with the previous one, she's surrounded by seasoned instrumentalists and guests), is shaped above all by the composite nature of its author's creativity. It's an intense, existential self-analysis, disconsolate and devoid of diagnosis, yet buoyed by a resolving catharsis. There's a rediscovery of her past as an original post-punk artist (first and foremost Glue, but also the Geraldine Fibbers): "Truth Is Dark Like Outer Space" and "Smooth Jazz" are poisonous shards propelled with unstable fervor. "Smooth Jazz" unwinds over nasty, marching drums that shatter the harmonic glacialness of the previous album, over an obsessive panzer of low strings and the leader's doubled screams, while "Truth Is Dark Like Outer Space" lays out a thicket of distortion sustained by organ and churned up by the jagged bursts of her singing.

"Winds Of St. Anne" flaunts a funereal drone and sets the lead vocal within it, accompanied by sampled voices and a deforming filter, in a disjointed ode. "The Frozen Dress" is a kind of invocation of silence, built on tolling compressed-bass chords and developed through swirling modulations, Ligeti-like vocal-continuums and unsettling samples. "For The L'il Dudes" even dares an abrasive gothic sonata for strings, built in pyramidal fashion.

"The Blue Room" is one of her longtime warhorses, a rarefied canzona of anguished folk-blues blossoming with chamber arrangements, while "Paper Kitten Claw" is a darkened lullaby that Lisa Germano's "Geek The Girl" would surely approve of. "Lucky Lucky Luck", on the margins, picks up the best anti-diva instincts of Lydia Lunch, cast in an arcane broadway-style with a swinging dotted rhythm.

Closing the record is the title track, a 12-minute black hole into which everything heard before collapses: it opens with a scattershot martial drumming and a trumpet in the distance, then the chaotic commotion hints at a kind of perverse rhythm and the voice delivers a grandiloquent prophecy echoed by guitar distortion. The instruments rumble in call-and-response as in the worst of anti-blues nightmares, then steer into a Cave-like sung stream-of-consciousness, howled like a demonic possession, while the organ launches its lament amid bursts of feedback and electro oases. In the second half the guitar takes over and replaces the organ in carrying forward the endless, tormented phrase pierced by relentless chaos, until it's left alone to let Bozulich utter her final words ("the word is love"), in a mere thread of voice.

Put to the test by the author's unbridled egocentrism, Hello, Voyager underlines a convincing display of multi-layered eclecticism (styles, incarnations, instrumental line-ups) that shifts at supersonic speed from cathartic intimacy to fearless fury, from tenderness to combativeness, from scornful irony to irreparable bitterness. It's also a logbook of Bozulich as an artist tout-court: her latest activity breaks through musical barriers and heads toward performance art, confirming her insatiable vital drive.

In 2009 the follow-up, Prince Of Truth, highlights an author in perpetual transition. "The Slayer" sprouts from the usual clump of electronics, distortion and drones, with Carla's voice less expressive (entirely leaning toward a resigned spoken delivery) and increasingly clogged with deforming filters; the track's novelty perhaps lies in a curiously Residents-like break that opens into a martial anthem. Thus the closer, "On The Captain's Side", is the equivalent of "Evangelista I" turned toward oldies, with a cappella vocal harmonies, quiet mists and instrumental breezes. Likewise, "You Are Jaguar" is her personal take on the uptempo (perhaps the most singable moment of her career, with a great display of guitars), and "I Lay There In Front Of Me Covered In Ice" is her take on the "slow number" (the least bleak episode by far). Several other songs simply gloss her repertoire with elegance: the pseudo-spoken-word, Laurie Anderson-esque "Iris Didn't Spell", the catatonic chansonnier cadence of "Crack Teeth", the mournful digressions and understated dirge of "Tremble Dragonfly".

The album's Achilles' heel lies in the larger arrangement of the tracks and in their connective tissue, a swarm of noise ecosystems even more prominent than before, already tested live (whence comes an embryonic version of "Crack Teeth") and the source of the "life" of Carla's singing and orchestrations. Blame her recipe book, less spontaneous, closer to a "tactic" that is nonetheless never vulgar. After Silver Mt. Zion and Nels Cline, her collaborators this time are even more tightly knit: Tara Barnes, Dominic Cramp, and above all the case's resident multi-instrumentalist, Lisa Gramble.

Carla Bozulich never stops surprising with the third Evangelista album, In Animal Tongue. After the transition launched by its predecessor, Carla carries on undeterred, genuflecting and martyring herself in litanies such as the title track and "Artificial Lamb". She even returns to the scorching climates of the first "Evangelista" with disjointed creations like "Die Alone", "Tunnel to the Stars" and the catastrophic instrumental "Hatching", worthy of the deepest gothic music. These are numbers worthy of her major career, and indeed of her recent omnipresence. An expressionist palette is missing, but in compensation there's her mystical ego, which makes it one of her most "crafted" and solemn works ever.

In 2013 Bozulich also became a producer; her imprint is notable on Blue Willa (A Buzz Supreme), the eponymous debut album by the Italian outfit, formerly known as Baby Blue.

Heralded as a return to the pop song form and to the solo album after so much group experimentation, Boy (2014) instead sounds like an escalation of those very same traumas. The elective affinity with which she picks up and reworks the most dreadful, insistent incantations of Nick Cave, from the abstract "One Hard Man" to the skeletal "Don't Follow Me" and "Ain't No Grave", is one of her most sincere. The arrangements are wrapped in a bloodied soundscape, torn to pieces and gazed upon with sadistic ecstasy. Despite a few more linear passages (courtesy of one of the few people who helped with the record, John Eichenseer), the album literally aspires to reinvent female singer-songwriting in a parallel world of impossible phrasings. Yet another confirmation of her genius and, perhaps, her legacy to generations to come.

Struck by a hearing problem after so many grueling, intense tours, Carla then takes time to reflect, a pause that nonetheless culminates in the "quieter" version of its predecessor and its violent atonement for being an "evangelist," Quieter (2018). A feast of guests, especially Andrea Belfi's electroacoustic soundscapes, this time help her paint one of her starkest sermons, "Let It Roll" (eight minutes), more lied than torment, more opera than expressionist pièce. Even heavier doses of transcendental concentration give birth to "Stained In Grace", an extremely slow spiral of ancient prayers. And Carla closes this little conclave with the even more hallucinated "Written In Smoke", even more prey to the panic of emptiness.

The record, being also an assemblage of leftovers, of tracks left unfinished over the years, also has its missteps in flatly melodic, rhetorical or conventional songs ("Sha Sha", "End Of The World", "Emilia" etc.), which do not do justice to the genius forged over years and years of experimentation.

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