MELISSA AUF DER MAUR - Bass Womb Room

This album isn't a comeback, but an unearthing, a story in which tape hiss becomes more important than the melody itself. Melissa Auf der Maur (former bassist for Hole and Smashing Pumpkins), returns sixteen years after her last solo work, "Out Of Our Minds" (2010), with a collection of demos recorded in the Nineties on a four-track Tascam in her Los Angeles apartment, back when the world knew her as a blazing rockstar. This is the private side of the woman who played the biggest stages on the planet and who, at home, alone, would record a dripping tap to use as percussion.

For Auf der Maur, the bass has never just been an instrument: it's a subterranean organ, a maternal cavity around which to build a landscape. "Bass Womb Room" thrives on this idea, its field recordings (crowds shouting outside venues, a camera shutter clicking, the noise of a city) weave together with the demos like threads of the same fabric. "Water Wars" and "Fresh Flush" turn the everyday into something magical, while "Desire Is Critical" is pure hypnosis, a loop that leaves you suspended between dream and waking.
The second half of the record is more song-based and less installation-like: "River's Dream" takes you back to childhood with a little girl's voice that seems to come from another dimension. Then there's "Skip A Beat" (intense and feverish) and a ghostly, hollowed-out cover of "Love Is The Drug" by Roxy Music, as if it had been sung in an empty room after a party has ended.

If there's a limitation, it lies in the fragmentary nature of the project, which is also its conceptual map. This isn't an album that's easily listened to from start to finish: it's an archive, a sound installation, a work conceived to converse with her photography exhibition, enriching the images with an intimate sonic backdrop. Melissa Auf der Maur isn't after nostalgic celebration; instead she short-circuits past and present, reminding us that analogue isn't a source of regret but a pure form of resistance.
For those who loved her in the past, like myself, still as smitten as I was on first hearing her debut "Auf der Maur" (2004), this record is a small, unexpected gift. For everyone else, it's a lesson in how to live as a rockstar.

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19/09/2026