VIA PRESS RELEASE | Wolf Eyes’ history with collaboration goes back almost 26 years. From the first Wolf Eyes w/Spykes concert that led to John Olson joining the band, to Smegma, Richard Pinhas, Merzbow, and many more. Wolf Eyes has continued expanding musical ideas through collaboration and Difficult Messages is the first compilation of this practice.
The Wolf Eyes duo of John Olson and Nate Young recorded with friends Alex Moskos, Gretchen Gonzales, Aaron Dilloway, and Raven Chacon over the last few years. The results were originally self-released as a series of super-limited 7” hand painted box sets. Difficult Messages collects the core “hits,” lovingly compiled by Disciples for wider consumption.
Many of the bands on Difficult Messages exist inside an assemblage of a mail art tradition. Most of the music was made remotely and this allowed for deeper exploration into styles that might have been too uncomfortable to attempt face to face. “Short Hands” finds Nate Young, and Alex Moskos exchanging bass and guitar fragments with Olson’s reeds and tones overtop sculpted into odd rock songs. “Wolf Raven” touches on harsh electronics and pushes forward into postmodern ideas of composition.
“Time Designers” is a duo of Alex Moskos and Nate Young using hacked drum machines and a “design” approach to organizing sound. “U Eye” finds Olson and Young alongside longtime collaborators Gretchen Gonzales and Aaron Dilloway for a scrape and tape session recorded by Warren Defever. “Stare Case” is Olson and Young in a non-Wolf duo. Perhaps the only “rules following” project these two have EVER had. The collection of audio tracks could be looked at as an exquisite corpse: a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. With this method over thirty tracks and four hundred paintings were created.
Following the touring around the Undertow and Strange Days II records on the band’s own Lower Floor imprint (a partnership with famed electronic music label Warp), the band reduced down from a trio to a duo with the departure of James “Crazy Jim” Baljo. Rather than replace him (in the way that Mike Connelly had previously filled a hole in the group caused by the departure of Aaron Dilloway), the decision was instead taken to strip down the unit to its essence, whilst also opening themselves up to a plethora of outside collaborations.
Setting up a series of residencies in different cities, they jammed with local musicians wherever they landed, playing with everyone from Hieroglyphic Being to Ryley Walker to Beatrice Dillon, recording the results as they went. Whilst all these encounters (numbering over seventy) produced suitably wild and weird results, the undoubted apex came when they shared the stage with Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra at the October Revolution Of Jazz And Contemporary Music in Philadelphia in 2018, a sequel of sorts to the mid-00s stage showdown with Anthony Braxton.
2019 saw the duo continue to tour internationally, and a triptych of sequential solo records by Nate Young on Lower Floor – Volume 1: Dilemmas Of Identity, Volume 2: Nightshade, and Volume 3: Dance Of The Weeping Babe. The striking videos for the three solo volumes were put together by long-time Wolf Eyes visual collaborator Will Benedict, with whom they had previously collaborated with on the performance of “Men Were a Mistake” at Torre Velasca, Milan the previous year, an event that the Catholic Church attempted to ban!
When Benedict was commissioned to put together a Spring campaign for fashion powerhouse Balenciaga the following year, Wolf Eyes were his natural choice to provide the soundtrack. The resulting parody of US news channels presented by grotesque alien presenters quickly went viral, racking up seven million views on Twitter alone. Things also came full circle with the Wolf Eyes story, when they re-engaged with Dilloway and Gretchen Gonzales of pre-Wolf Eyes combo Universal Indians as “Michigan Underground Audio Sprawl” unit Universal Eyes.
Their site specific artistic approach and relentless touring would have presumably continued without pause had the world not gone into lockdown shortly afterwards, and as with most active artists this led to somewhat of an existential crisis of how to carry on. This is thoughtfully narrated by Young in an accompanying film the band have made about the Difficult Messages project and their attempt to cope with the life as they knew it collapsing. Part of processing what was going on was starting a series of long distance sound exchanges with both trusted comrades and new connections, including the Pulitzer Prize winning Native American artist Raven Chacon, Montreal based Alex Moskos of Drainolith and formerly of AIDS Wolf and of course the Michigan veterans Gretchen Gonzales and Aaron Dilloway.
Mixed and mastered by long-time associate Warren Defever (His Name Is Alive) at Detroit’s Third Man Studio, the results were cut to twenty 45rpm 7” singles, each punched with a big centre hole, jukebox style, with stamped labels, and made available in a series of four handpainted wooden boxes in extremely limited numbers. Combining their visual art with painting and sculpture was something the group has not explored so extensively since the very early days of Wolf Eyes.
From December 2021 to February 2022 the band worked intensely on a unique residence and exhibition for The New York Public Library For The Performing Arts. Wolf Eyes created new instruments specifically for the Music & Recorded Sound Division, and a limited-edition, full-length LP was recorded using only these instruments and the entire pressing given away to the public for free. The exhibition also featured an installation of over 60 painting assemblage “scores” made collaboratively by Nate Young and John Olson. The instruments, art, and LP are now part of the Library’s permanent collection in hope that generations will be inspired to take the sonic ideas into their own creative process.
2023 will see the band building on all this work with new tours and two new albums in the first half of the year (a duo record, Dreams In Splattered Lines, will follow in May), as well as the usual tangents, side hustles, art and inzanity.
