Chelsea Wolfe has always tied engrossing visuals in with her droning, hazy music. Take the Mark Pellington-directed film that accompanied 2013’s Beauty is Pain, a casual 50 minutes of surreal imagery released on a 4 GB USB stick. Or last year’s deeply disconcerting video for ‘Feral Love’ that switched from shot to shot, dragging the viewer through their own fears. Light-hearted fun all round.
This morning, Wolfe has released the video accompaniment to ‘Carrion Flowers’, a track that we described as a "crepuscular slab of goth-industrial folk" on its release the other week. Directed by Wolfe and bandmate Ben Chisolm, it is as unsettling a video as we’d expect from Wolfe, flicking between black and white cuts and blurring the line between the waking and the imaginary, an attempt to capture the pseudo-reality that Wolfe’s sleep paralysis brings out.
Explaining the video, Wolfe said: “The visuals in the video allude to the drought in California and frustration about corporations being allowed to pump out all the water, destroying environments and communities, just to sell it back. While writing Abyss, I lived near where the water is piped into Los Angeles, but the lakes were dried up and the mountains were burned from fires. During filming we were exploring cracked lake beds and washed out roads – at one point I was laying in the middle of an abandoned canyon road with no chance of a car coming, and it was very surreal and quiet. I closed my eyes for a moment and when I opened them there were vultures circling overhead like I was some exotic roadkill, so we filmed them too.
The scribbles and ropes in the video are about my own madness and self-doubt, and costume designer Jenni Hensler made me a human cocoon from this insane fabric – it represents a feeling of claustrophobia, like you just want to scratch your way out of it. And there is anger in this song; it’s got a sense of revenge for anyone who has suffered or died because of injustice."
‘Carrion Flowers’ is the latest track to be released in advance of her forthcoming LP Abyss, released on August 7th.
