Oakazine

Dark folk songstress Chelsea Wolfe is a study in contrasts. Whether it’s her self-confessed shyness juxtaposed with her commanding and hypnotic stage presence or her big city sound compared to her small town roots, this magical musical mastermind creates enchanting songs that leave even the most jaundiced concertgoer spellbound. On her aptly titled debut The Grime and the Glow, Wolfe fuses noise-heavy dissonance with luminously layered dark psych for a sound that’s profoundly beautiful yet menacingly macabre-laden. I recently got the chance to speak with this sonic savant about fashion, her varied influences, and the occult.Interview after the jump. — Text by Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman. Photos by BC.

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Last year one of my iPod staples was Wierd Records act Frank (Just Frank) — a synth/jangle rock duo from the French Riviera whose darkly echoey music is reminiscent of early REM and The Smiths. Although in the past few years 80s nostalgia has become something of a dead horse, Frank (Just Frank)’s excellent debut LP “The Brutal Wave” sounds like lost Murmur b-sides with Morrissey on vocals; spinning nostalgia on its head by, at times, doing 1983 better than the originals. Frank (Just Frank) was founded by high school friends and metal-heads Anthem and Kirti with the aim of injecting their black metal brutality into synths, drum machines, and jangly, elliptical guitar riffs. Taking the catch-all metal term for something good, “brutal” wave came to be both the name of FJF’s debut and an accurate tag for the music they created which lies somewhere between cold wave and new wave — dark, but still full of shimmeringly poptastic pay-offs. An instant dance floor hit at the Wierd Records party at Home Sweet Home, FJF quickly got signed to Wierd and became a cult favorite amongst the post-punk aficionados that flock to Wierd Wednesdays weekly. Although Kirti and Anthem are no longer making music together, Anthem recently relocated to New York to work on new FJF material and focus on his more metal-informed solo stuff which he debuted to the Weird crowd in January. OAKAZINE met up with Anthem and spoke about French music scenes, brutal wave,  and being an American ex-pat in France. — Text by Marlo Kronberg. Photos by Jakob Axelman. Editor/Production: Peter Berwind Humphrey. Interview and video for “Die in Bed” after the jump.

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How To Dress Well has a name lifted from a 1980s handbook for Miami Vice aspirants, and makes music that sounds like Shai, Keith Sweat, and Tommy Mottola-era Mariah being filtered through a smashed, fuzzed-up AM radio. He’s sampled both DeBussy and Blackstreet, harbors a desire to record something high-gloss with Kanye, and mentions Nostalgia for Death & Hieroglyphs of Desire by Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia in the same breath as Maxwell Unplugged when listing off creative influences. It’s contradictions and nuances like these that have made How to Dress Well (a.k.a Tom Krell) a particularly mysterious internet presence. But it’s also his sound, which re-appropriates slow jam leitmotifs such as marzipan falsettos, silk sheet beats, and whoozy synths and soaks them in a bubble bath of reverb, that has established HTDW as one of the most unique indie music break outs in recent memory.

A Cologne-based Post-Kantian philosophy scholar by day, by night Krell was creating his self-coined “ambient R&B post-pop” under the nom de guerre How to Dress Well. When he first cropped up on blogs in the Fall of 2009 with the first of seven EPs released in a six month period, he was quickly identified as the latest in a string of “chillwavers” — a loose grouping of DIY artists creating reverb-drenched retro pastiches from their bedrooms.  What set Krell apart from other prominent chillwavers like Toro Y Moi and Washed Out though was his tackling of a genre that has fallen prey to particularly cruel irony. Krell fragments and then lovingly reconstructs 90s sweet love making soul, so the results sound like slow jam’s touches and curves abstractly remembered through the fog of twenty years. Despite dealing with a sound that could easily go the way of parody, never once is HTDW’s music winking or smirking. To wit, Krell once called Twisted by Keith Sweat “a fucking masterpiece.” In Fall of 2010 How to Dress Well released his debut Love Remains LP to press acclaim, and went on world tour soon after. OAKAZINE caught up with Krell before he played a show in the rec room of Church of the Messiah in Brooklyn. The choice of location was HTDW perfect (read:perfectly, weirdly oppositional) with pre-school children finishing up recess as the grungy sound guys in flannel started filtering in. Recently having relocated to Chicago,  How to Dress Well looks forward to translating songs from Love Remains into string arrangements, touring with an orchestra the summer, and releasing his “mind-melting” sophomore album. Interview after the jump.– Text by Marlo Kronberg. Photos by Jakob Axelman.

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Just as the sun-dappled, craggy terrain of Laurel Canyon birthed the sounds of psychedelic rock, the 4 pm sunsets and ice-glazed pavement of New York winters is giving rise to an au courant, localized sonic sensibility: noir gaze. “We’ve been called dark wave and noir gaze,” explains multi-instrumentalist Jennifer P. Fraser of Brooklyn dream-rock act ZAZA, “It’s a little peppered with goth, co-authored by sentimentalism from the 80’s and early 90’s. I think it has to do with the landscape of New York, frankly. I think the pavement and the gloom, extreme seasons and angular nature of New York informs what’s going on in music right now.” Comprised of Fraser and multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Danny Taylor, ZAZA creates spaciously orchestral, oneiric fuzzscapes that recall the the bite and scratch sensuality of 90s acts like Spiritualized, My Bloody Valentine, and Slowdive. Rooted in Taylor and Fraser’s love affair — which quickly spun its way into musical collabo territory — ZAZA’s music is intimate, vertiginous, primal, and bewitching. Just like love.

Fraser and Taylor are both West-coast natives who met by chance at an out-of-the-way concert in Brooklyn, each brought there by the intuitive sense that they would meet someone important that night. Californian Fraser had been on tour for four years with traveling neo-psych collective The Warlocks, and was on hiatus in New York visiting friends. Taylor, an instrument restorer by day and Brooklyn multi-instrumentalist-about-town by night, had worked with the likes of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Kordan. Soon after this momentous first encounter, Fraser moved to New York, and the two found themselves spending a particularly hard biting winter confined to Taylor’s Brooklyn loft. There, prodded along by the stray instruments that were always lying around, the duo began creating Philip Glass-informed orchestral soundscapes and collaging random looped sounds. ZAZA, in its first, raw iteration was born. Now, with live percussionist Dru Prentiss added into the mix, and a further-evolved sound which melds the orchestral with pavement pounding percussion, spectral vocals, and somber washes of drone, ZAZA is looking forward to releasing their first LP later this year. OAKAZINE caught up with Jennifer and Danny and spoke a bit about noir gaze, processes, and fate. To download ZAZA’s newest MP3 “Distance Creator” visit www.zazasound.com. Interview and more pictures after the jump. — Text by Marlo Kronberg. Produced by Peter Berwind Humphrey. Photos by Therese and Joel.

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When you see Brooklyn-based dark pop act Eva and Her Virgins perform, you’re instantly transfixed by Emily Powers — the goldilocks corset-clad front woman with the big old voice. Originally from the Ozarks of Arkansas, and then the projects of Florida, Powers moved to New York City at age eighteen in search of fame and fortune as a singer. In the ultimate tale of New York kismet, she met bandmate and collaborator Jabbath after posting flyers up in Times Square. “I made a date to meet him on 21st and 7th and he didn’t know where that was and I was like ‘This guy is an idiot.’ But he walked in and I knew immediately that he was the guy. It was Jabbath.” Powers recalled, “My heart stopped when I first met him and we were together every single day for the next two years.”  After recruiting Emily’s sister to be their bass player, Her Virgins started burning a swath through New York City’s downtown venues with their lively performances, powerful lyrics and so-called “dark pop”. After our conversation I knew that performer, songwriter and singer are but a few of the aspects that make Emily Powers the powerhouse that she is. Eva and Her Virgins recently released their first album “Dark Pop” and look forward to world domination. Interview with Emily Powers after the jump. — Robert Garcia

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