some hot live woelv traxx

if you haven't picked up tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur? yet, or need a better reason to justify said purchase, here are three tracks from a recent woelv set, opening for mount eerie in philadelphia. the taper didn't get the full tracklist, and i managed to forget my copy of her album at home (i'm traveling at the moment), so i don't have any track titles for you. but, after all, it's not like i took her song names too seriously before, so this small hindrance shouldn't take the wind out of your sails.

you can download the whole show here.

buy tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur? from k records.

song 1
song 2
song 3

tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur?

there are a lot of words that describe geneviève castrée, the artist who performs as woelv, but, somehow, none of them seem right. it turns out i lied to you back on the last day of november, when i claimed that the year might well be over as far as seriously good music goes, and no, 8 diagrams is not the reason why. i had forgotten about woelv, who i saw opening for mount eerie in a church basement, who was releasing her seventh (!!!) album (though only her second full-length as woelv) on december 4. seriously, how does someone put out sixth albums without going some sort of internet notoriety? don't blogs exist so that that doesn't happen anymore? anyway, her impossibly titled album, tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur?, was released five days ago by k records, during which time it has utterly seduced me with its bizarre drama and hopeful anxiety.

geneviève castrée is québécoise, a graphic illustrator and painter from the suburbs of montréal. she taught herself guitar in order to create songs to accompany her paintings. indeed, castrée's method for understanding tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur? best is to get the "book-record" lp version, which comes with a 60-page book of artwork and translation from french to english. ...wish i'd known about that version before i got the cd. the album is sung entirely by castrée in french. recently on tour with mount eerie, castrée is a close confidant of phil elverum's, and her naturalistic style often mimics his [elverum also appears on "(réconciliation)"]. woelv, however, sings about a different nature than mount eerie, whose songs are gentle and respectful; castrée is anxious and nervous, caring and doting, confused yet assured, and her paradoxes are woelv's heartbeat.

there are a lot of pictures of woelv out there, but this one in particular, striking and evocative, sums up woelv's aesthetic, oddly paradoxical though that seems. cathartic yet self-reflective, castrée's music is minimal to nearly the extreme, though its beauty is something to behold when she rips the silence to shreds, whaling on her guitar and wailing her lungs out. the disparity of the two, clearest on "drapeau blanc," tout's first song. it builds tentatively, cautiously, as castrée builds her loops, stringing her voices together in a choir. a harsh drumbeat lifts the song's energy, accompanied by raw, dissonant shrieks from castrée, beautiful and terrible, before it abruptly subsides, leaving a hole where none existed before.

i like to think of tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur? as two things: cold music and headphone music. i've been listening to this album while traveling to work the past few days, with the wind slicing down my neck, and i can't imagine listening to woelv in any other way. there is a stillness to tout that suggests a silent winter forest, and a tremulousness chill in castrée's voice that cannot be soothed by the summer sun. in addition, castrée's voice sounds like a fusion of björk's and jónsi birgisson's, and has seemed to absorb by association (they're from iceland. she's from canada. those places are cold!) their wildly stylized yet implicitly naturalistic vocal renderings. like the wind whispering across ice or through trees (as it literally does on tout's title song), castrée sounds like the voice of winter. oh, and the fact that lots of her press photos feature her bundled in this warm red coat helps with the winter analogy as well.

i was listening to tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur? on my way home tonight, when i realized how loathe i was to listen to the album on my stereo. there is a raw intimacy in listening to woelv on headphones, the music rich in your skull, every nuance enjoyed and wondered at. castrée's voice is remarkable, childish yet mature, a strong foundation for woelv's songs, which can really only be appreciated on a (good) pair of headphones. i know all music is better on headphones, but this is one of the rare few that really should only be listened to on headphones. songs like the (nearly) acapella "la mort et le chien obèse" are painstakingly constructed around castrée's vocal loops, which are almost indistinguishable on a stereo. a real connection is felt, a bridge between you and woelv, that is the emotional crux of her music, one that i feel best through headphones.

my one real complaint about tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur? is its haste. not its brevity - i think the album is a good length - but the little time for reflection we get between songs. especially in the beginning of the album, when we need the time to process song by song, we instead get five songs practically overlapping. woelv's music is so striking, so bizarrely compelling, that it requires time to digest, to be comprehended. also, geneviève castrée may think that i would enjoy her album more if i had the translation in front of me, but i in no way feel hindered by the language barrier - i even find it liberating. i can get lost in her sounds, the lilt of her voice as it climbs octaves, the gorgeous lo-fi equality of the sound, the true complexity of her loops, which i would have a much harder time doing if i was translating every phrase. as mr. mammoth readers know, i'm no stranger to non-english music, and i find castrée's music all the more beautiful for my own inaccessibility to its true meanings. tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur? is an open-ended story, a choose your own adventure, and i like it that way.

"drapeau blanc" & "sous mon manteau"

buy tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur? from k records.

stream the album (if you don't believe me on how good it is) here.

mount eerie w. woelv, flying, karl blau @ lutheran church of the messiah, 11/8/07

(sorry for the delay, my computer broke this week and only got it fixed today).

phil elverum and his friends (at least the ones who played at the lutheran church of the messiah last week) have something in common: they are astounding. last thursday's incredible basement show, lit by candles and colored lightbulbs, was simply transportive. the 150 or so people crammed into the greenpoint church were quiet, respectful, and stunned by what we saw - simply, one of the finest shows of the year.

as you may have guessed by now, this was a todd p show (who else has concerts in church basements?), and was a study in sharing and tolerance. the neighborhood demanded low volume (the word was that the mount eerie show, audible only if no one else was talking, was the loudest ever in that space), and the hush became an integral part of the show's magic. huddled in a basement with polish beer and flannel jackets, the stage barely illuminated by amber and blue cliplights, all four acts (karl blau, flying, WOELV, and mount eerie) played with noble restraint, their music replacing their selves as the audience's focus.

karl blau, last-minute addition to the bill, was another horse from the k stable (along with woelv and mount eerie), and a longtime elverum disciple. blau was a looping wizard, crafting gauzy sonic tapestries with a heavy 60s pop feel. it was often enjoyable unclear the extent to which blau improvised on premeditated melodies; his songs developed organically, growing note by note without any discernible guide. it was riveting, reinforcing the incredible intimacy of the space, especially when he didn't use the mic, his voice carrying just as far without amplification. between songs, blau seemed to suffer from some stage fright, stammering and telling stories, but there was no such nervousness in his songs. methodical and compelling, blau set the tone for the show: quiet, intense, and remarkable.

"dark magic sea" - available at kelp monthly.

flying, next up, was the only non-k band, and the difference was palpable. while blau, and later, woelv and mount eerie, embraced the quiet, flying was clearly less at home. the trio, however, adapted well to the limits of the space, expanding and dimming their sound without diluting it. flying commented more than once on the required volume, saying "we've never played such a quiet show before." yet because flying was the only band limited by the volume constraints (and, actually, the only band, since all the others were solo artists), their set was aurally and visually engaging and innovative. during one song, flying's drummer and keyboardist stalked along the back edge of the stage, yelping and hooting in time with the music, their grunts echoing in the hushed space. flying's sound was an odd one, a sort of postmodern weimar cabaret effect, creating a pastiche of prettiness, like juana molina without electronics. it often seemed as if all three were playing in disparate keys, rhythms, and tempos, yet the music was well-blended and exciting.

"minors" - from just-one-second-ago broken eggshell, available from mill pond records.

one of the coolest elements of the show was the effort todd p made to keep the crowd seated. for a stage that was no more than two feet high, this was both a logical and aesthetic decision. though sitting on a hard floor for three hours really kills the butt, a sitting crowd kept the show intimate and special. sitting there, in the near-darkness, the music literally washed over us, and the church's basement was really a sanctuary.

WOELV is the inexplicable pseudonym of geneviève castrée, a quebecois artist who deserves every single comparison to sigur ros. true to her roots, castrée sings only in heavily stylized french, backed only by guitar and her own looped voice. breathtakingly beautiful in her stark musical simplicity, WOELV was riveting. castrée's airy choral onomatopoeias served a feather bed for her verses, warm and soft against the transcendent wails. castrée's vocal style begs comparisons to jónsi birgisson, her singing chillingly evocative. WOELV used a guitar for some songs, but the most moving songs were the acapella ones, her voice echoing against itself in the tiny room, relaxing yet spine-tingling. as with blau, WOELV found that using the microphone wasn't absolutely necessary, and some of the evening's best moments were during her set. i was stunned by the sheer beauty of her songs.

"drapeau blanc" - WOELV's tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur? will be released on december 4 by k records.

mount eerie is a band for completists. phil elverum has released somewhere between 8 and 10 million albums, as both the microphones and mount eerie; his lastest, mount eerie pts. 6 & 7, is a 132 page photobook that is "the visual counterpart to pretty much the entire catalog of the microphones and mount eerie," overexposed and lovingly reimagined images of our natural world. accordingly, mount eerie's set was backdropped by short movies of beautiful and terrible interactions with nature. phil elverum, minimalist, naturalist firebrand, matched his songs to the images, pairing his more frustrated songs with videos of steel refineries and the soothing, elegant ones with ferns blowing in the wind or fog rolling over an evergreen forest. at times, it was so beautiful that tears came to my eyes. having extinguished all electric lights, elverum was lit only by candles on the stage and the reflected light from his backdrop, and it was the easiest thing in the world to close your eyes and see the cloud-topped mountain or the moon rising over a harbor. serene, reflective, optimistic, mount eerie was as spiritually rejuvenating as a sermon.

mount eerie plays new york again in december, at st. mark's church. you would do well not to miss it.

"wooly mammoth's absence" - from australian tour ep, available here.

phil elverum runs his own store here, where you can buy mount eerie pts. 6 & 7, among other treats.

mount eerie song