Carla Bozulich announces new album Quieter and shares advance track "Glass House"
Carla Bozulich
Quieter
CST132 180gLP / DL Out 11 May 2018
Constellation is pleased to present legendary underground singer/songwriter and sound artist Carla Bozulich's new album Quieter as its fourth release of 2018. Following her outstanding creative output in The Geraldine Fibbers, Ethyl Meatplow, and Evangelista (among many others) – and her tremendous 2014 solo album Boy – Bozulich is back with a new collection of powerful, intensely atmospheric, emotive songs rounded up from various recent collaborations.
Carla Bozulich is diversely experimental, uncompromising and continues to be ceaselessly devoted to mixing art-punk ethics and creativity. Here, with Quieter, is an intensely emotive, intuitive, enchantingly cohesive collection of previously orphaned and one-off tracks where, uncharacteristically, nothing ever quite screams. Carla’s way with a fleshy edge remains sharp as ever. A couple of these are left over from the bountifully productive sessions from her brilliant and widely-acclaimed 2014 album Boy; others featuring collaborations with the likes of Marc Ribot, Sarah Lipstate (Noveller), Freddy Ruppert, Shahzad Ismaily and more.
"Glass House" (Feat. Freddy Ruppert)
Her first (and classic) 2003 solo album Red Headed Stranger was re-released by Folktale Records in 2016 and her mid-90s band The Geraldine Fibbers’ equally classic 1995 album Lost Somewhere Between The Earth And My Home was reissued on Jealous Butcher Records in 2017. Carla also penned the devastatingly poetic and powerful rape-survival essay “Thanks, Motherfucker” for The Quietus in 2016. And of course she’s continued playing venues small and large, including OFF Festival in 2017, opening for Godspeed You! Black Emperor in 2015, and for Swans at their farewell NYC shows in 2017.
This recent period has also found Bozulich reflecting on 25+ years of life on the road, the labour and hustle of DIY touring, with its ecstasies, agonies, succour and sacrifice: “still a fantastic job to have” as Carla writes in the Quieter liner notes:
"The cover of the album is a cool pic, sure as hell. But to me, it just looks like tour. Tour is just another job where if you do it long enough you get hurt here and there. In 2014 I lost my hearing completely (temporarily) in 1 ear. I kept playing, as always with injury on tour. After all, it is the law of averages. We all know it. Play more than 100 concerts a year doing 90% of the work alone, injuries are occasional. Well, it was a loud tour—a loud set every nite. It was strange for the volume to be cut in half. I cannot play with ear plugs, I was swirling sound every nite like falling but still refusing to behave—sit still—or even cancel. And boy, it was freaky QUIETER. This photo is from one Otolaryngologist I saw in Austria right before the concert in Graz. His treatment was to put me in a 50s Soviet style scalding hot head-heat-box for 20 minutes. After a while I got bored and took some selfies. They came out exactly like this. Thus the cover. It was a Quieter time for me, like—in the van Mats Gustafsson sounded like cherry ice cream. Finally quiet in the fucking van. I couldn’t understand what was happening unless I turned my head. I completely stopped listening to people talk. Strange concerts. Le Guess Who was a highlite—very like thrashing through the air, as the numerous monitors seemed to be alive and spinning. Eventually I cleared it but not after several promoters kindly took me to crackpot doctors who did silly things. This is a nice deaf pic for the Quieter album. To me it just looks pretty like tour: still a fantastic job to have." – CB
Photo: Jennifer Kitner
Praise for Carla Bozulich's 2014 album Boy:
"It’s another glorious achievement for an artist who has created so much amazing art since arriving into the world fully formed way back in 1982. Long may she run." - Paste
"Perhaps Carla Bozulich's most essential record... Boy is a living, gasping, impassioned/dispassionate grapple with existence. It patiently yet economically moves through melody and rhythm to walking, dancing, convulsing, and fleshing the fuck out." - Tiny Mix Tapes
"Bozulich’s vocals are so forceful and transfixing, in fact, that it's easy to overlook her skill as an arranger and sound artist. Playing the majority of the instruments herself, Bozulich specializes in creating combinations of sounds and textures that continually loosen the songs' moorings... Bozulich uses the vernacular song forms of country, blues, and yes, even “pop”, to tap into something that feels much more elemental, a vein of primitive emotion that feels like it could pre-date the notion of musical genres entirely."
- Pitchfork
"A landscape where Tom Waits and Michael Gira enjoy critical tongue-baths ought to make room for Carla." - NME
