Sweet Wreath Speaks! No.22
Hazel Cline interview: part two
Next Wednesday August 9th!
Clownfish Aqua Yard Costume Party!
It’s humid out there….the only solution is to add more water until we become aquatic!
Weston Olencki on tour performing experimental drum music
Witch Grass aqua yard orca-stra (music for whales attacking boats)
plus! Jimmy Griffin sings about horses and sugar!
at Sweet Wreath, 8pm
BYOB + donations for bands
Hazel Cline :
thoughts & text for Spell Song
How has Atlanta specifically influenced you?
Our environments always influence us. Sometimes we choose where we live by accident of what is available at the time and, yet, how drastically we are shaped by the shifting shape of our lives. The stairs we go down in the morning, the sidewalk we walk and talk along with friends, the road we drive to work on, and the sounds of life around us. I have lived in three locations in Atlanta, and all have had unique and significant influences on me. Before I moved to Atlanta, I had already sloughed a lot of old familial baggage, the religion of my parents being one of the heaviest among them, and my world was a world of emptiness, sometimes of agoraphobic panic and sometimes of tranquil beauty. When I moved to the Seminole Ave apartment in Atlanta, I began to see things of great variety flit through my environment and fill it slowly with small things that came and went freely. When I moved to the Dearwood house, I made friends with some of those flitting things, and invited them to stay. And in my current apartment, sandwiched between Briarcliff and Rosedale, I was finally able to extricate things that had dug beneath the surface of my inner world. The streets are magical, and walking them, a spell. Of course, living in Atlanta is not just about the physical environment, it is about the people who live here. We moved to Atlanta to be close to friends and better participate in collective creativity. We have made so many important connections with individuals and groups. We are lucky to be near to the ever-inspiring surrealist and creatively adjacent community in Alabama. Ladonna Smith has always been encouraging of my musical experimentation, despite my being unable to see anything to encourage in myself. Significantly, in 2022, we were told about the wonderful collective and improvisational activity at No Tomorrow in Underground Atlanta. The amazing musicians, artists, performers, and magical people we have had the great joy to witness and engage with at No Tomorrow, such as Priscilla, Ray, Raelixe, Lucifer, Alice, and Majid to name a few, regularly capture and express the marvelous in such a passionate and potent way that they transform the very air around them and lay bare the inner spaces of matter, filled with teaming and beautiful darkness.
What else are you thinking about or whittling away at currently?
I am usually working on a few different things. I have a sound piece I am working on, which is a song of unrequited love to the universe. It’s something that’s a little different for me, so I have spent more time in the preparation stages than I normally do for a sound piece, which I generally create more automatically. I expect to finish it by the end of July. I am also working on a long, written work of experimental science fiction called Seven Sisters, which has been somewhat tormenting me since the end of 2020. I hope to finish the writing of it by the middle of 2024, but I am also planning to create dozens of ink and wash illustrations to go with it. That being a medium I am not well-practiced in, I expect that portion of the project to take some time.
Hazel Cline Spell Songs
by Amy Hale
Regardless of the medium she chooses, Hazel Cline will transport you. Her destinations are not necessarily frightening, although they are often unsettling. Cline’s art forces confrontations with exquisite otherness, the strangeness brought into relief by the simultaneous experience of familiarity. She reveals a thing you know well, maybe intimately, yet it is also utterly foreign. Her sense of the uncanny is oddly soothing. Cline’s first excursion into recording, the charmingly off kilter Spell Song, introduces the listener to the coziest of dark places.
Spell Song, released in July 2023 from Alabama based experimental arts collective Sweet Wreath, contains twelve enigmatic and delightful tracks which provoke an oddly voyeuristic response, as though the listener has stumbled upon a different world, one impossible to locate in time or place. Spell Song is an auditory bricolage, a collection of layered sounds woven together with Cline’s improvised vocables, and breathy refrains which she employs as both tune and percussion. While Spell Song clearly owes a debt to industrial and avant garde music with its dissonance and found sounds, this album feels anything but industrial, instead marked by gentle chimes, soft percussion and innocent humming.
Spell Songs feels like being comforted by an alien mother, spinning ageless stories in a tongue that is not your own, but which you still recognize from the beginning of time, familiar in its ancientness. The second track, “Thlalu” recalls a strange, gentle vocabulary lesson from a kindly and remarkably unfamiliar elder. The ninth track “Wrendine” is genuinely more haunted, as Cline layers a hummed refrain with a variety of sweeping spectral sounds. “Eostre” sounds like a sweet lullaby lightly echoing across the commons of an imaginal primeval settlement. The final track, “Spell Song to Quiet the Storm Inside and Outside” is a rhythmic and discordant incantation, slightly disquieting, both beautiful and anxious.
Cline is a member of the Atlanta Surrealist Collective known as Peculiar Mormyrid and is quite simply a wildly unique creative force. Her modes are revelatory and mediumistic, working with intimate unseen collaborators on volumes of poetry, gothic short stories, film, costume, sculpture and collage and even a tarot deck. In Spell Song Cline has tapped into something deeply atavistic, an experience of music from a time when humans were other beings, recalling archaic forests and our mythic early selves. Yet this collection does not feel intentionally primitive, instead emerging from a deep source and connection. Cline returns from these hidden spaces and with Spell Song offers the listener a key to enter into the most enchanting and provocative shadows.
Listen to Spell Song Here
above collage images by Hazel
Thank you for reading, until next time….
