Rijeka 2020 – EPK and Distune Promotion announce an exciting “female” summer of music!
This summer, the Kitchen programme line of Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture, in collaboration with Distune Promotion, brings brilliant female bands to Rijeka announcing a new music programme – the Furioza Cycle! Visitors can expect a musical walk with stops in post-punk, goth, indie rock and techno. The link between them is the fact that it’s music created by women musicians who move boundaries, provoke genres and build new, exciting musical worlds. The Furioza Cycle reveals Rijeka and its exceptional locations once again to audiences from the region.
The first name proudly announced by the organisers is the American musician Chelsea Wolfe who will perform on the Trsat fortress on 1 August. This will be her first solo concert in this part of Europe.
As part of her European tour, Chelsea Wolfe will promote her sixth album, “Hiss Spun”, which strengthened her status as one of the most impressive underground musicians of today. In Rijeka, her specific musical style will be augmented by the fairytale ambiance of the Trsat fortress.
Unlike her previous albums that were guided by the intimacy of folk music stripped to the bone (“The Grime and the Glow”, “Unknown Rooms”) or pulsating electronics (“Pain Is Beauty”, “Abyss”), her latest album “Hiss Spun” is extraordinary because of a combination of loud bass, rumbling drums and ample distortion. Recorded in Salem, Massachusetts, it partly took on the ambiance of the cold white New England winter, although the framework of the material was spun out of the ups and downs of Chelsea’s personal life, for which the author herself said it was marked by an acceptance of her own vulnerability, anger, self-destruction and a dark family past.
“I wanted to write some sort of escapist music; to set free the songs that were inside the body”, says Wolfe.
This digging in her own insides and the insides of the world is one of the most consistent themes in her work.
“You’re just bombarded with constant bad news, people getting killed for crazy reasons or for no reason at all, and it seems like the world has been in tears for months. And then you remember it’s been like this since the beginning. It’s overwhelming and I have to write about it”, says the musician.
The music on her newest album is very multilayered: a strong bass foundation is coated by a layer of low-frequency sounds, mixed with disturbing sound collages added by Chelsea’s longtime associate Ben Chisholm: a rumble of a construction site in Prague, a coyote’s howl near Chelsea’s country house in California, scraping of machines on the warehouse floor at a friend’s workplace…
Powerful and emotional texts with healing effect, unusual sound collages and the ambiance of the Trsat fortress are a good reason for you to mark 1 August in your calendars with a red marker.