#Divide and Dissolve

[omegaremix]

Omega Radio for June 18, 2022; #311.

King Woman: “I Wanna’ Be Adored”

Electric Wizard: “Funeralopolis”

Thou: “Maps”

Isis: “Celestial (The Tower)”

Acid King: “Middle Of Nowhere, Center Of Everything”

Heiress: “Unsettler”

Lingua Ignota: “Butcher Of The World”

Divide And Dissolve: “Black Supremacy”

Dreamwell: “Sayaka”

Touche Amore: “Feign”

Hesitation Wounds: “Guthrie”

Every Time I Die: “The Whip” + “We Go Together”

Poison The Well: “Without You And One Other I Am Nothing”

Prize: “Total Fidelity”

Will Haven: “Firedealer”

Sumac: “Rigid Man In Vein” (Kevin Drumm RMX)

Cult Of Luna: “Cold Burn”

Vein.fm: “Errorzone”

Meshuggah: “Light The Shortening Fuse”

Neurosis: “Takeahnase”

Tribes Of Neurot: “Grace track 5”

Deluxe metalcore, sludge, stoner, and doom.

[chelseawolfeonly]

www.chelseawolfe.com/shows

[sinceileftyoublog]

Black Belt Eagle Scout Interview: Expanding My Vulnerability

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Katherine Paul began the Black Belt Eagle Scout set at Pitchfork with whispered singing. As “My Blood Runs Through This Land” progressed, the song a standout from their third album The Land, The Water, The Sky (Saddle Creek), Paul’s singing transformed into a wail, albeit muted by her own guitar distortion and Camas Logue’s mighty drums. Fittingly, Paul’s voice never seemed like it was at the center. It was there, telling her stories, but always equal in sonic and emotional importance to her surroundings. Sometimes, the neighboring elements were symbolic, like the guitar solo of “My Blood Runs Through This Land”, “emulating [her] ancestors running,” as she told me at Pitchfork. (Paul is Coast Salish/Swinomish, raised in the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community in LaConner, Washington.) Other times, they were perhaps coincidental, as when she sang about being “engulfed by beauty” on “Don’t Give Up”, right as her singing was overwhelmed by the swirling of Logue’s drums, Nay Wilkins’ bass, and Claire Puckett’s guitars. No matter what, the set was a masterclass in tension and ultimate expressiveness, the songs exponentially louder than their studio versions. With every repetition of “Need you, want you” on Mother of My Children’s “Soft Stud”, the guitars bellowed with mammoth force, the crowd whooping in approval. It was breathtaking.

The Land, The Water, The Sky is inspired by Paul moving back to the Swinomish Reservation on which she was raised, as well as her metaphoric personal journeys. The record contains love songs of varying recipients: her surroundings (“Nobody”), her immediate family (“Spaces”), her local queer community (“Sčičudz (a narrow place)”). This time around, she worked with some notable collaborators on the record, like multi-instrumentalist Takiaya Reed of excellent Melbourne doom duo Divide and Dissolve, who co-produced the album, and Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum, who sings on “Salmon Stinta”. Though Paul played many of the instruments on the record and certainly led its expanded instrumental palate, its instrumentation and production was not a one-person affair like her previous two albums. Many artists find working by themselves intimidating; in contrast, for Paul, opening herself up to other musicians in this way was a key part of her growth in confidence. Ditto for playing live. “I have a really amazing band,” Paul said. “We’ve grown so much...for most of the year, we’ve been on the road non-stop, so we’ve learned how to work through certain sounds and passages together.”

Paul and I sat outside the festival press tent (as JPEGMAFIA boomed in the distance) to discuss The Land, The Water, The Sky, playing live, her writing process, and Divide and Dissolve. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: You have three albums already and a somewhat limited set time. How do you decide what songs to play at a festival?

Katherine Paul: I really wanted to play a lot of the new album, but also bring in some of what I felt are the heavy hitters from my previous album. [Songs] that make the set flow. I tried to put some of the new singles in the set, and some that are the favorites in the previous albums. Since you’re playing to a lot of new people, too, something that keeps the energy up.

SILY: I definitely felt that with what you chose to play. I had never seen you live and wanted to come in green, so I didn’t watch any videos, and your set was definitely louder than I expected, in a great way. There was a lot of play with dynamics and catharsis and release. Are you feeling those emotions on stage?

KP: Yeah, I mean I feel like we kick it up a notch, and I like to rock out. For this show, I played on an amp I don’t normally play out of, and I loved it. I kind of want to get one. I love playing loud guitars. [laughs]

SILY: When you play live, do you find yourself in a similar headspace to when you wrote the songs? Are you trying to channel on stage what inspired you to write them in the first place?

KP: I think about what they mean to me, which is maybe a similar thing. I think about why I play certain parts. When I play “My Blood Runs Through This Land”, the guitar solo is supposed to emulate my ancestors running. It’s raw and beautiful. I think about that and put my feeling and playing into those thoughts. I like to make a connection to what the song means to me when I play it.

SILY: On the record, you did a lot of the instrumentation yourself. Do you find adapting the songs to the stage, with a full band, just as rewarding as writing and recording them in the first place?

KP: I’m still learning. That’s what I’m realizing. Sometimes, my natural instinct is to play them how they sound on the recording, but lately, I feel like I want to put a jam in there. [laughs]

SILY: You played “Don’t Give Up” right before playing “Indians Never Die”. In interviews around the release of Mother of My Children, you were talking about “Indians Never Die” and the idea of always taking care of the land. When you sing on "Don’t Give Up”, “I was only seventeen, I was only seventy,” is that a similar sentiment?

KP: “Don’t Give Up” has a lot of writing about my mental health and taking care of myself, having that knowledge that we’re still growing as people and trying to figure things out, whether we’re seventeen or seventy. That’s what those specific lyrics mean, but I think that could tie into, by taking care of myself, I’m taking care of the connection to where I’m from.

SILY: I also like the phrase on the song, “engulfed by beauty.” It suggests being almost overwhelmed by nature, and it works with the heavy reverb of the music.

KP: Yeah. Being swallowed by it.

SILY: Have you gotten to see anyone else at the festival?

KP: I got to see snippets here and there: Vagabon’s one and a half songs, Weyes Blood, Big Thief, yaya bey. I wanted to see Julia [Jacklin], but I couldn’t. Her set was so short. There was a lot of running around, getting food, getting situated.

SILY: Do you like the new Divide and Dissolve record?

KP: I haven’t heard it yet. I’m waiting for the right time to listen to it. I know it’s out, and I want to listen to it when I’m at home on a walk. When I heard the previous record, I was just gutted. So I want to listen to this one walking around in the woods or something.

SILY: Apart from the specific stories and changes in your life that inspired The Land, The Water, The Sky, is there anything else unique about it as compared to your first two records? And how is it a continuation of them?

KP: There are still those glittery sounds within the pop genre that pop up. The uniqueness comes with expanding my vulnerability as a songwriter, having different people play on it. It shifted my perspective of what my songwriting can be. Before, I was more afraid to take risks and do different things, but now, I feel better about it--almost encouraged.

SILY: Are you the type of songwriter always writing, or do you have to set periods of time for you to sit down and do it?

KP: I definitely have to set time aside to do it. I have so much going on in my life. [laughs] It’s hard to always be writing.

SILY: Is there anything else upcoming for you?

KP: I’m working on a mini tour documentary with Evan Atwood, who did the photo [on the front cover of] the album. We’ll have some live recorded versions and filmed versions on the songs. This coming winter, I’m just going to write music and figure out what’s next.

[nando161mando]

Oldest trick in the book: divide and conquer

[watermonkeystuff]

Divide And Dissolve live.

[dustedmagazine]

Divide and Dissolve — Systemic (Invada)

Photo by Su Cassiano

Divide and Dissolve continues to provoke, even if some of the questions are becoming a bit familiar: Can instrumental music express a politics? Is there anything intrinsically subversive in the fact of women of color making heavy music? Is doom metal the right (sub)cultural space for indigenous-identified women wishing to promulgate a socially conscious, anti-colonial agenda? Systemic doesn’t provide any evidence or assertions that will settle those issues, even as the band’s public-facing discourse and promotional chatter strike ever more righteous rhetorical stances. This reviewer is down for the politics. The music is a more complicated proposition.

Doom metal is conventionally possessed of feeling tones that seem suited to Divide and Dissolve’s project: misery on tectonic scales, anger that smolders and simmers and then erupts into sudden conflagration. Other bands have coupled that tonal range with left-leaning socio-political messaging; for recent examples, see Forlesen’s ecologically minded folky doom, or Mordom’s application of glacially paced bum-out music to the problematics of dope addiction. Even more relevant are many of the records released by the Body over the last fifteen years — see especially No One Deserves Happiness (2016) or many of the cover songs compiled on Anthology (2011). Somehow the political content of the Body’s music is both more and less didactic than what Divide and Dissolve has succeeded in articulating, and certainly it’s a lot more compelling, aesthetically and ideologically. 

That’s not so damning a criticism, given the Body’s excellence, which is tough for any band to compete with. But it’s worth noting. Divide and Dissolve gets most didactic on Systemic with “Kingdom of Fear,” which includes a spoken word performance from poet Minori Sanchez-Fung. Over the band’s cool drone and occasional stirs of noise that evoke Earth’s more recent work, Sanchez-Fung intones, “In the kingdom of fear, a shadow hovers over my cover of leaves and violets,” and later, “I have pleaded to consult the chorus of night, to hold the strands of moon that tether me to beauty and let me rest.” The language isn’t straightforward enough to stir politicized passions, and while the images sustain a reading that underscores women’s productive powers, they collapse into an earth-mother symbolics that feels dated and a little soft, when a more militant response seems necessary to confront the injustices attending our current conjuncture. 

The record is better when the music does the talking, as it usually does for Divide and Dissolve. “Indignation” commences with a couple minutes of woodwinds, interlaced and gesturing toward symphonic textures, performed by Takiaya Reed. The inevitable, deafening entrance of Reed’s guitar sounds simultaneously like explosion and collapse, which is not easily done, and which is a fitting sonic complement to indignation: the emotion moves toward the world with aggressive rage, and also back into the person feeling indignant, who insists on the overriding validity of her feeling, her ideas, her sense of fairness. That’s the sort of interest that Divide and Dissolve is capable of generating. 

Of course, none of that relative complexity controls what a listener might tend to feel indignant about. Tune into the various permanently outraged talking heads on The Daily Wire, for instance, and you’ll hear a whole lot of indignation: Matt Walsh’s moronic (and always creepy) reactionary chatter about the status of the noun “woman,” or Candace Owens’ latest bit of semi-coherent clickbait (this reviewer was particularly grossed out by her defense of the cause of the American Confederacy on putative social class terms). Perhaps doom metal would not be the first choice to soundtrack those bits of rightwing bilge — but I can hear Moonsorrow’s insipid, Viking-obsessed, musical muscle-flexing whenever Walsh or Josh Hawley start yip-yapping about masculinity. 

But that’s me. Music’s nonrepresentational access to feeling may be its most distinct and its most powerful aesthetic property. In that aforementioned promotional chatter, much is made of Divide and Dissolve’s investment in the unifying power of non-verbal communication, and the undervalued extent of that non-verbal communication’s presence in our lives and experiences. But the non-verbal is still socially constructed and patently representational. See the recent transformation of the thumb-to-forefinger “OK” sign into an emblem for white power, which occurred through the functionality of social media-driven symbolics. Divide and Dissolve make heavy music, and these are indeed heavy times. To intervene effectively, the heaviness may need the iterative and representational power of the verbal. And when it’s invoked, that language may need to be political, focused and forceful. 

Jonathan Shaw

[nbernardo]

Divide and Dissolve @ Amplifest, Porto - 24.09.2023 © Nuno Bernardo

[linksvorne]

104. DIVIDE AND DISSOLVE. 2022-11-28 @ Venster99 (w/ Age Of Strange Cults)

[stylized-corpse]

Tonight! So excited to see Chelsea Wolfe for the first time!

[maquina-semiotica]

Divide And Dissolve, "Far From Ideal - Chelsea Wolfe Remix" #NowPlaying

[faetoothofficial]

Song of the Day

[omegaremix]

Omega Radio for March 14, 2020; #222.

Harvey Pekar “Tittering Smoke”

Prayer Group “Code Black”

Sunstroke “Revival”

Great Falls “Kettle Logic”

Agenda “Life Left Behind”

Cancer Bats “Inside Out”

Help “The Devil Is A Snake”

Verdun “L’Enfant Nouveau”

American Nightmare “Life Support”

Buildings “Sit With It”

Horsewhip “Fires”

Exhalants “False (St)art”

Remote Viewing “Whitney Houston, We Have A Problem”

Divide And Dissolve “Prove it”

Human Impact “November’

Big Business “Heal The Weak”

Keelhaul “39F”

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs “Reducer”

Anywhere But Home “We Should’ve Stayed Strangers”

Drug Church “Blissed Out”

Less Art “Mood 7 Mind Destroyer: Guilt”

The Body “Myth Arc”

Pinko ‘Spit On The House”

Faking “Less & Less”

(J.J. Paradise) Players Club “The E.M.P.”

The Hope Conspiracy “They Know Not”

Caspain “Vision Blues”

All twos. Noise rock, doom, sludge, stoner, and metalcore volume.

[exit-babylon]

The New World Order - The utter destruction of freedom of speech, religion, national sovereignty and identity.

[icymusicdiary]

daily song rec 18

[revilermpls]

Photos: Chelsea Wolfe At The Varsity Theater

Chelsea Wolfewith Divide And DissolveVarsity Theater Minneapolis, MNMarch 20th, 2024