Spiral Staircase - Music from the Uninhabitable Body

She hasn't even turned eighteen yet, and she already has at least a couple of truly substantial albums to her name. I'm talking about Audie Ellis (aka High Priestess, a name she takes from being a practicing Wiccan), the artist behind Serotonin (2022) and, above all, The Perfect Child (2024), works steeped in those disturbed and disturbing sonorities that essentially revolve around the theme of gender dysphoria.

But let's start from the beginning. Actually, let's start with her own words: “I was born on July 25, 2007 in Connecticut. I moved to Pennsylvania between 2013 and 2014. For some reason my childhood memories are a bit fuzzy, but as far as I can remember, I've always been obsessed with music and art. Music has surrounded me my whole life, since most of the members of my family played instruments, produced music, did theater programs, and in general listened to a lot of it around me. I owe my passion to my parents, who at a certain point had me listen to a ton of 90s big beat and electronic music, in particular The Crystal Method, Prodigy and Chemical Brothers. So I became obsessed with electronic music, constantly browsing the iTunes store on the family computer and listening to the short previews for hours and hours, until something scratched my brain in just the right way: at that point, I'd nervously ask my parents if I could buy a song. I was also constantly on the lookout for apps containing great songs and CDs in my parents' collection to listen to on the family stereo. What really got me interested in music was messing around with GarageBand on the computer when I was about four years old. I kept creating new characters to export my songs under, with names like “Cowboy Jack” and “DJMission,” and then I'd force my family members to listen to them”.

Until she was eleven, Audie used the name DJMission for, in her own words, “shitty electronic music” basically made out of loops. After taking on the guise of Clutrrglych, the name she still uses today for her forays into electronic music, in 2020 she started getting involved in Bandcamp's netlabel scene, also experimenting with other aliases for smaller projects such as Tweedguy, Hurineth and Mother. Her first non-solo project, Lemon Toad, dates back to 2019, shared with her friend Mailli and oriented toward experimental pop. It was with Lemon Toad that Audie got her first concrete traction on the Soundcloud circuit, even if it wasn't exactly what you'd call “success.” Either way, from that point on things started going the right way, and fate also lent a hand.
“In 2021 I met my friend Brandon Hunt on Discord. He played guitar and was just starting to record songs and post them on Soundcloud, so he asked me how I produced stuff and got it onto streaming platforms. Within a week or two, we started collaborating on music and founded The Newrids, my first venture into making noise-rock-oriented music. Even though, looking back, our debut album, ‘Death Is Futile’, sucks, I learned so much making it!”.

If the experience with Newrids allowed Audie to get to grips with singing and recording real instruments, the arrival of the Spiral Staircase project allowed her to come to terms with her most varied influences, ranging from Swans (“above all!”, she's keen to point out), in particular the beloved “Soundtracks For The Blind” (1996) (“It's a terrifying album, but I want to live inside it. It's probably the album that's influenced me the most of all”), to Nine Inch Nails, by way of Broadcast, Jane Remover, Mid-Air Thief, The United States of America, Prodigy, Spirit of the Beehive, Ween, Pulgas, Black Midi, Have A Nice Life, Unwound, Quadeca, Weatherday, Car Seat Headrest, Haley Heynderickx, Peter Brotzmann, Sweet Trip, Sprain, Microphones etc.
“Spiral Staircase started out as a one-off project based on a poem/rant I wrote while feeling very depressed. I wanted to put something out on my friend Stockport Swimming Team's netlabel called Welcome to Clydebank. Initially, I only intended to release the track that gives the project its title and then drop the idea, but I ended up making a second song (‘Fall Further Down’), and so Stockport Swimming Team convinced me to do a couple more songs and turn it into an EP. I decided to make Spiral Staircase a completely anonymous project and created a character to hide behind, with alternate accounts. The self-titled album was also partly meant as a love letter to Nine Inch Nails, since I was and still am obsessed with them. In the end, I gave up the mysticism a few months before ‘The Perfect Child’ came out”.

A still-immature work, the self-titled Ep (4 tracks; 55:30) was recorded by Audie in an attempt to "express the emotions I had at that moment, with no self-imposed limits. It's harsh, it's trite, it's melodramatic, but after all I was fourteen years old…". While the title track offers up an obtuse electronic brawl, "Looking Down" is marked by leaden dark-ambient atmospheres, with voices surfacing out of nowhere like ghosts. "Fall Further Down", for its part, throws industrial, harsh-noise and mental illness into the blender, while "Walking Up Again" brings down the curtain with a deafening lament. Despite being an Ep, it comes close to an hour in length.

After the Ep Inhabitable (an inconsequential mix of sound collage, breakcore and free-improvisation, released at the end of 2023), the leap in quality was striking with the monumental Serotonin (12 tracks; 142:26), essentially a revisiting of the first album, "with a much bigger idea, much more effort and much more depression", explains Audie, who continues: "I spent about a year, on and off, making 'Serotonin' and I learned a ton from that work. Its last two songs ("The Lightning Overhead" and "Concrete Shoes", ed.) pushed me toward a more melodic, softer direction, which I knew I wanted to explore further with the next project".
From noise to experimental rock, from doom to slowcore, from avant-garde metal to glitch, from ambient-drone to power-electronics, from folk to sound collage: the stylistic range of Serotonin is vast and testifies to the will to use the musical medium as freely as possible, to build not songs but veritable scores of torment and despair.
"Blood Shot Eyes/Black Robes" materializes with exasperating slowness out of a bleak guitar brooding, surrounded by industrial hisses and noises; past the fifth minute, the mystery thickens, between plucked strings like hysterical bows, chamber music that gradually destructures itself against an icy, echo-laden backdrop and, finally, mirages of vaporized silence.
Leaving behind the radioactive glitch-noise weave of the first part of the title track (the second part is instead dominated by flashcore aesthetics), we enter relatively less abstract territory with the grueling "We Are Of Abundance", a genuine exercise in controlled chaos on the margins of a retrospective on the early stirrings of power-electronics. While "Starver" (which "is about starving yourself to death to commit suicide": “Il mondo fuori/ Svanisce/ Tutto ciò che resta/ È la via della fame/ Non posso scappare/ Questo bisogno infinito/ Ha preso il sopravvento/ Su ogni parte di me”) filters industrial metal through the lens of obsession and paranoia, the twenty-eight minutes of "Pyromaniac" outline, for its first quarter-hour, a psychedelic garage-noise nightmare with occult shades, steeped in a surreal atmosphere, as if Fushitsusha's "1st" and the Microphones' "Mount Eerie" had crossed paths somewhere beyond this life. In its second part, this behemoth, still centered on the theme of suicide, progressively empties itself out, moving from a hideous bacchanal for foundry and berserk lasers to a long coda in which first a synthetic organ and then a voice catapulted into a hall of mirrors try to crack the shell of divine indifference, while the mind, ever ready to open its most hidden chambers when properly prodded, runs to the Faust of the final section of "Meadow Meal".
After the wavering dark-ambient of "My Love", the hell painted by Serotonin gains a new circle thanks to the obtuse psych-noise trance of "Shell Of A Human", in which Audie's mind fights against her own body. This track "is mostly about the stress and guilt that stemmed from discovering my gender dysphoria, together with the attempt to come to terms with a childhood trauma".

Why am I so numb to the concept of harassment
Why do I flinch when someone raises their arm
Why do I cry when someone shouts
Why do I feel covered in filth
Why do I want to run away
Why would I want to kill myself
Why do I scream and cry when someone grabs my left thigh
Why do I have such disturbed thoughts
Like 'I want to mutilate my face so no one could see what I look like'
Or 'I want to drink all his alcohol and collapse drunk in front of him'
Or 'I want to lie to everyone and say I'm a pedophile and torture animals for pleasure'
So that no one would be sad if I killed myself
I shouldn't think these things
I should be happy and grateful
To have been put on this earth
But it feels like everything wants me out
I wish those who created me loved me for who I am
And not for who they want me to be
I want to be your daughter
I want to be your daughter
I've wanted it since I was little.
I can't stop thinking about it
I can't fucking stop thinking about it

In "Ball And Chain", a sound poem that in more than one moment seems to evoke the most enigmatic moments of Kraftwerk's second dispatch, the force of love asserts itself as the only anchor of salvation in the stormy sea of nihilism. It's about, Audie explains, discovering a certain beauty in life, or the "lightning bolt", the one that "shakes your world and changes your outlook". The same disruptive force of love underpins the cosmic architecture of "A Realization", in which all pain vanishes into the whirlpool of noise. To close, there's lo-fi folk still in the vein of Phil Elverum.
"The Lightning Overhead" is folk-core of despair. Closing things out is the long confession of "Concrete Shoes", centered on "the attempt to not give up on life, no matter how much it hurts and how comforting the idea of death might seem."

Right after the release of Serotonin, Audie started working on its successor, which would see the light of day on November 1, 2024 under the title The Perfect Child (8 tracks; 118:08), a work still imposing in length, terrifying in emotional impact and bold in its blending of genres. As for the themes explored, everything still essentially revolves around gender dysphoria, though Audie is keen to clarify a few points. "I try to express emotions and states of mind through my music in the best way I can, because I like it when art is able to really make you experience a state of mind with no filter", Audie says. "I also do my best to make that possible. Also, I'm a bit surprised that gender dysphoria is often the only theme people pick up on from this album. While it is the most important theme, people read the lyrics of songs that aren't entirely about dysphoria and get confused, because they don't read deeper into them. Songs like 'A Confession' and 'Predators', for instance, are mainly about grooming and the PTSD that resulted from it".
As for the average length of her compositions (here still very substantial), the artist explains: "First of all, I like long songs; then, I'm indifferent to long songs (as long as they're interesting and don't last more than three hours, unless they're really, really good); lastly, I think long songs are a great way to fully immerse yourself in a certain atmosphere. Most of the time, something that happens in real life usually doesn't last two or three minutes, it's something that happens over ten minutes, thirty minutes, one or two hours, because time doesn't cut between sequences to keep your attention alive. Using time and building an emotional atmosphere feels much more visceral and real to me."

In this annihilating, not for the faint of heart work, Audie is supported by friends Brandon Hunt (guitar, bass, voice, piano, synth, field recording), Stockport Swimming Team (broken cables, pedals, tape recorder, synth and "a lot of other abuse of analog and digital equipment") and Lavender working magic with glitch.
"Brandon Hunt is my best friend. He lives in Sydney, Australia, and we've worked closely together since we were thirteen. He's flown to Pennsylvania a couple of times and has played a key role in my growth as a musician. He currently works under the project My Shirley Remains, and we make music together as The Newrids. Stockport Swimming Team, on the other hand, was the first person to get to know Spiral Staircase, and contributed a lot to the layers of structural noise on both 'Serotonin' and 'The Perfect Child'. He's from Glasgow and I've known him since 2020. Lavender is another dear friend of mine: she currently makes music under the alias Mothbloom and runs the netlabel 'Side Onlose'. I recommend listening to her album 'Revive'. We met because she was a fan of 'Serotonin', and we've worked closely together ever since".

Within the grooves of The Perfect Child, a less sprawling work than its predecessor and, all things considered, her best to date, Audie piles up tons of pain and anguish, releasing a first dose in "My Name Is Paige", a slow, depressed dirge that around the fourth minute detonates around the beating heart of Red House Painters, only to then entrust itself to a piano to take the pulse of the darkest night, the one that words, like rusty blades, try to tear open.

I bought new body wash
I wore my socks today
I put away my clothes
I want to try again
I want to try again
I want another chance
I want to switch off the pain
I want to know what power I'm trying to gain
I want to live again
I want to live in my own skin

Structurally erratic, the tracks on The Perfect Child usually start off subdued, muddling through more or less ungainly folk-slowcore confessions, before flaring up or collapsing in on themselves, as in the case of "Golf Course" (“Quando sorge il sole/ E passa un altro giorno/ Quando sei tutto represso/ L’amore viene fottuto dalla tua assenza”), "Slut" (which has in store a raw hybrid of garage-noise and cyber-grind), "The Hermit" (in which the memory of early Xiu Xiu's destructive emotional shocks resurfaces) or, again, "Destroy", where a long lo-fi agony is a prelude to a march loaded with devastation, symbolizing how Spiral Staircase's music bursts forth from the deepest caves of the self. Past the eleventh minute, out of a raw climax emerges a chorus of ghosts and then a piano ostinato.
Without a break, we move on to the sprawling "Uninhabitable Body" (twenty-five minutes and thirty-nine seconds), which first plunges us into an enchanting glitch-ambient landscape, in which a hypnotic piano figure slowly carves out space. In this first part, rounded off by yet another confession from Ellis (“Oh ma il mio cuore/ Per sempre è cambiato quel giorno/ Oh e la pioggia ventosa non è riuscita a lavare via il mio cuore”), la musica spinge potentemente all’introspezione. Bisogna chiudere gli occhi e ascoltare: ascoltarsi. Basta però un attimo perché tutto vada in mille pezzi. At that point, it becomes necessary to come to terms with the "uninhabitable body".

Hair is like spiders
Cuts swell up like insect stings
Rib cage too wide for the skin
God forgives, God forgives
For the destruction of your creation
Creation is worse than hell
The blade cuts like insect stings
Cuts hair like heaven
Cuts like skin should
But goosebumps don't forgive

Meanwhile, a violent burst of grindcore pierced by digital flashes follows, and then a hip-hop storm, like Death Grips put through the blender by Atari Teenage Riot. But that's not all, because "Uninhabitable Body" still has in store the spoken word of a robot besieged by guitar roars, a Show Me The Body shut up in a garage and surrounded by scribbled-on Slint posters, and, again, a triple-speed free-jazz free-for-all, out of which rises a metaphysical voice: the ecstasy of surrender, that same enchanting glitch-ambient landscape once more joining the Alpha and the Omega.
The fifteen minutes of "A Confession" keep probing the depths of the soul, first relying on that subliminal mumbling that carved the essence of "Spiderland" into itself, and which then translates into sounds made of mirages, into desert-rock for wanderers at the borders of the unspeakable, and then into a long, pestilent doom procession, similar to the inescapable nostos of an Ulyssean antihero, his mind prey to a babel of voices and gruesome memories. In short, there is no salvation. And if you've had the strength and the courage to make it this far, you still have ahead of you the (unforgettable, ça va sans dire) twenty-eight minutes of "Predators", the last "spiral staircase" before dissolution, amid earth-shaking instrumental thickenings, electronic short-circuits, psychic shocks, cymbal and drum upheavals, and torments:

I'm back to square one
within these broken blue walls
in water without soap
in men's clothes
(And you can't help but scream until you wake up
30 minutes have passed
And you know what you saw)

A few seconds before the sixteenth minute, Ellis screams "my name is Page" (the name Paige represents, for Audie, the personification of gender euphoria, basically that feeling of no longer being a stranger in one's own body), and her scream turns into a jet of noise, so that the circle can close with a detonation reminiscent of the one in the first track. The voice, by now wrecked by the ordeal, surrenders to an irreparable pain: “Vedo la panchina su cui c’è scritto: ‘Colpiteli dritti’/ Trattengo la lacrime mentre mi allontano guidando/ L’estate finisce, e io sto ancora aspettando”.

Having released one of the most beautiful, intense, adventurous and honest records of 2024, Audie keeps looking to the future: "I hope to put together a live band for Spiral Staircase soon, so we can play live and get more known. A lot of my songs were made with the idea of playing them live in mind. In the meantime, I'm already starting to work on the new record. I plan to put a huge amount of effort and time into every song. I want to try to make everything a bit shorter and denser, as well as exponentially better than 'The Perfect Child'. I'm especially excited to collaborate with some amazing artists for this project. I have no idea when it'll be officially announced, because it's still very early in terms of production. It could be in five months, it could be in four years. We'll see".

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