Chelsea Wolfe has a new remix EP out and it’s called ‘Undone’. In order to discuss it, we need to talk about the album the tracks are drawn from, so; Earlier this year, Wolfe released ‘She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She’ which paired her haunting singing voice with pulses and electronics making for a record full of beautiful but eerie soundscapes. It was a marked contrast to her recent solo albums like ‘Hiss Spun’ which favoured heavy guitars or 2019’s ‘Birth Of Violence’ which drew on acoustic guitar, but the electric and industrial sounds were still perfectly in-keeping with her gothic oeuvre. On ‘Undone’, six of the songs were given to a range of artists to be reinterpreted and remixed. In practice, this means each track basically takes Wolfe’s original vocal, isolates it, and injects the song into a more distinctive electronic palette. The results are unusual chimeras that exist in different genres and are quite at odds with the songs that birthed them, and each other.
The most notable song here is ‘Tunnel Lights’ remixed by ††† (Crosses). The band, made up of multi-instrumentalist Shaun Lopez and Deftones’ Chino Moreno, have taken the original song and completely reinvented it with pulsing beats and a throbbing bassline. It sounds just like one of their own songs, albeit with Wolfe’s vocals fitting into the place usually reserved for Moreno’s smooth croon, making for a stunning track that’s worth the admission price alone. Similarly, ‘Boy Harsher’ uses a gated drum sound, a soft bassline and chiming keyboard to completely transform ‘House Of Self-Undoing’ into a 1980’s style synth-pop track. It’s genuinely surprising how well it works, especially the counterintuitive way it uses Wolfe’s breathy vocal.
This being a Chelsea Wolfe recording it’s no surprise that at least half the tracks have an unsettling atmosphere. On the most experimental song ‘Whispers In The Echo Chamber’ Forest Swords foregrounds dripping, clanking and thudding sounds while presenting the vocals as an eerie whisper. In this context, Wolfe’s song has the presence of a horror movie soundtrack and is a captivating reinterpretation.
The original album’s closing track ‘Dusk’ had a simplicity that emphasised the vocal’s haunting quality, making it perhaps the most beautiful. On the version here, Ash Koosha pushes it in a totally different direction. The vocal emerges from an unsettling swamp and is then crushed by a series of throbbing, industrial munching sounds, before giving way to rapid handclaps and what could be a rebooting DOS computer. Although the track loses focus and meanders to a disappointing conclusion, you can’t deny how unsettling and hostile the opening is. Its tone and feel shared by Full Of Hell’s interpretation of ‘Eyes Like Nightshade’ which totally strips out the original’s beauty, shoving Wolfe into the background in a dense swirl of harsh whispered screams and Super Nintendo blips. It’s aggressive and nightmarish and another startling reinvention.
‘Undone’ is a fascinating, uneven but frequently brilliant companion piece to Chelsea Wolfe’s original album.
IAN KENWORTHY