Wolf Eyes Announce 'Dreams In Splattered Lines' LP

Wolf Eyes (the Michigan-based experimental sound and visual art collective currently led by Nate Young and John Olson) announced Dreams In Splattered Lines, their first widely-distributed non-compilation album in six years, will be out on May 26th via Disciples.

Alongside the announcement, the duo has shared a trio of songs collectively called Splinters Of Shattered Time, which includes "Engaged Withdrawal," "My Whole Life," & "Days Decay" from the upcoming full-length.

This year also marks the 25th anniversary of Wolf Eyes exploring new ground in experimental art and music. To celebrate the occasion, Wolf Eyes will perform a triptych of shows in their hometown of Ypsilanti, Michigan, plus additional live dates to follow including performances with the multi-hyphenate and legendary composer Anthony Braxton.

Dreams In Splattered Lines fuses together Wolf Eyes' 25 years of DIY electronics with the avant-garde sensibilities of Fluxus and the granite of dreary Midwestern life. Continuing some of the ideas explored on the Presents Difficult Messages record of collaborations, the result is a surreal dreamscape of disorienting sound collages, where hit songs are transformed into terrariums of sonic flora and decimated fauna.

As if pulled from a fever dream, the surrealists of the 1960s converge with alien electronic blues musicians in an underworld of mystery. The air is thick with car wash radio white noise, crackling and fizzing like a toxic elixir, spoken word poetry transmissions as absurd and cryptic phrases. Each corroded aural environment is a microcosm of chaos, honed to razor-sharp precision. Swept away in a whirlwind of thirteen perplexing narratives, each one an unpredictable journey through subterranean worlds, a sonic trip of reality folded into itself.

Currently operating as a duo, co-founder Nate Young comments: "This record was recorded after we finished the New York Public Library residency in early 2022. We had spent a lot of time in NYC during the residency but because of Covid we had limited access to the Library archives. We would spend 4-5 hours at the library and then go to museums. The MET's Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibit was a huge influence on this record. Learning about the Chicago Surrealists' spoken-word poetry performed with musicians was inspiring and affirmative.

"While Surrealism could generate often poetic and even humorous works, it was also taken up as a far more serious weapon in the struggle for political, social, and personal freedom, and by many more artists around the world."

We started by continuing to explore the ideas of short dense sound collages that had similar behaviors to "hit singles". Using a lot of ideas that we established on the Difficult Messages series, we started to look at hit songs like terrariums: folding the idea of music and sound happening inside sound environments we created in the studio.

The record starts with a Car Wash that includes a Short Hands track playing on the car radio while waves of white noise and contact microphones are plunging into water buckets. The track is then played in a car while going through an actual car wash and finally layered and mixed in the studio."

The other half of Wolf Eyes and a member since 2000, John Olson (aka Spykes, Inzane Johnny, and over a hundred other sobriquets via his long-running American Tapes imprint) adds: "Dreams in Splattered Lines is the latest in Wolf Eyes' journey into the corners of unknown electronic subterranean worlds.

Thirteen tangled stories razor sharp from the duo's recent Difficult Messages singles foray starting with a unique "suite" from "Radio Box" to "Engaged Withdrawl" and ending with the grim title track, here is Wolf Eyes at their most abstract yet corrupted listening experience yet. For a group that would rather invent genres rather than follow them, Dreams in Splattered Lines is the twisted road that leads another 25 years onward to the unquenchable passion of unknown arcane electronic worlds. Music dreamt in 242 B.C. and horribly born in 20042 A.D."

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 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 three albums in the first half of the year: Dreams In Splattered Lines has been preceded by the January compilation of collaborations Presents Difficult Messages, and April saw the release of Wolf Eyes w/ Spykes, bringing a much sought after early release to vinyl for the first time, documenting a recording session pivotal to the ongoing development of the group's sound. Alongside this has been the usual steady stream of lather cuts, side hustles, art and inzanity.

Dreams In Splattered Lines is out May 26th, 2023 via Disciples, and is available to pre-order here.

Photo by Alivia Zivich

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