Hello Readers,
Welcome back. Have you listened to any good music lately? If not, there’s plenty on this site to listen to.
She’s baaaack! Melissa Auf der Maur is a Canadian musician who broke into the music scene while attending school for Photography and working as a part-time DJ for a well-known rock club in her native Montreal. She met a fellow student, Steve Durand, and formed the band Tinker in November 1993. By this time, she had become pen pals and befriended Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan after a fist fight between her roommate at the time and Corgan during a 1991 show in Montreal. By the Summer of 1994, Auf der Maur was being vouched for by Corgan and recruited by Courtney Love and her band Hole to join as their new bassist after the overdose of bassist Kristen Pfaff months prior, which was two months after Kurt Cobain’s passing. Auf der Maur continued with Hole until 1999, after her contract ended.
The timing was perfect for her to join the Smashing Pumpkins after their bassist D’arcy Wretzky left. As Auf der Maur was quoted in an interview with Q magazine, “Courtney knew I was leaving to make my solo project. But then, coincidentally, the week that I left Hole was the week D’arcy left the Pumpkins. So, within a week, Billy called me and said, ‘The stars have aligned: it’s time for you to join my band.’ I had to do it.” Unfortunately, the Smashing Pumpkins broke up in 2000. So Auf der Maur began to work on recording the solo music she had been creating over the years, eventually releasing her self-titled debut Auf der Maur album in 2004 to favorable reviews.
In 2002, Auf der Maur was joined by drummer Samantha Maloney (Hole), the iconic Peaches, bassist Paz Lenchantin (A Perfect Circle, Pixies), and guitarist Radio Sloan to form The Chelsea. The group played one show in LA. Auf der Maur also formed a Black Sabbath cover band that year as well. Delving back into solo work, Auf der Maur released …This Would Be Paradise EP in 2008, followed by OOOM EP the next year, which also included a comic book as well as a 30-minute short film created by Auf der Maur and her husband, Director Tony Stone. The full-length album Out of Our Minds in 2010 received favorable reviews from the music media.
Auf der Maur truly is a jill of all trades as a musician (bassist, guitarist, singer), songwriter, actress, and, one of her first and biggest passions, photographer. Her photos have been featured in multiple magazines as well as part of multiple galleries, including one in Brooklyn in early September 2001 and another in Montreal in May 2006. And earlier this year, she published her memoir, Even The Good Girls Will Cry. Find more about it at that link.
At SWT, we support and advocate for artists. Creatives. Not just or only musicians. So today we are combining photography and an art gallery along with someone who was heavily in the music scene. It’s pretty fucking neat if you ask me.
From the press release for this upcoming album of new music, along with a museum exhibit of photographs as well as a photobook!, “Camera in one hand and bass in the other, Montreal-born musician and artist Melissa Auf der Maur spent the 1990s touring the world with iconic ’90s alternative rock bands Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins. Today, she announces BASS WOMB ROOM: My ’90s 4-Track Demos x Field Recordings, her first new music in over 15 years, out digitally and via cassette on Sept. 4th via Envision Records. It features seven never-before-heard 4-track tape recorder demos written and recorded by Auf der Maur in the ’90s, as well as eight new “interludes” created for her upcoming museum exhibition Melissa Auf der Maur: My ’90s Rock Photographs, opening Sept. 2nd at the Art Gallery of Ontario. A 240-page photobook of the same name, arriving Sept. 8th via DelMonico Books/D.A.P. and the AGO, accompanies the exhibition.
Auf der Maur wrote the 4-track demos on BASS WOMB ROOM in her living room home studios in the 1990s, on her trusted Tascam 4-track. The songwriting and instrumentation were often anchored by an acoustic guitar, then layered with vocals as well as lo-fi 4 track tricks such as flipping the cassette backwards, or pitch shifting. Lyrics were streams of consciousness or direct reads from the diary in which Auf der Maur wrote every day—reflections on blistered fingers, desire, and the moon landing. Other featured instruments include the bass, a vintage Ross phaser guitar pedal, and a cheap keyboard. Auf der Maur also sampled field recordings of mundane, everyday sounds—a dripping leaky faucet, her camera shutter—captured on the pocket-sized cassette dictaphone she carried alongside her camera. All seven of these demos were recorded and self-mixed right there and then at home. These are the final works from that time. There has been no modern intervention for this release other than mastering.
The ’90s 4-track demo songs are presented alongside interstitial sound pieces that score Auf der Maur’s BASS WOMB ROOM installation at the AGO museum, co-produced by Auf der Maur and Alex Crow. BASS WOMB ROOM the installation is a mirror pyramid surround of video, set to the music; it’s both a celebration and emotional centerpiece, a site designed to give visitors to the exhibition a taste of the transcendent experience of being on the road, performing on stage, before cell phones and digital recording. Auf der Maur often placed a video handycam on her bass amp during Hole and Smashing Pumpkins shows to film the audience. The sound pieces featured in the exhibition are mostly drawn from these recordings, sampled and then connected by a recurring heartbeat that symbolizes both the bass (“the mother of all instruments” she says) and the womb we all come from.
This album is an interaction between the ambient yet noisy BASS WOMB ROOM installation score, and the seven ’90s demos made by the girl who took the photos in this exhibition and book. There is a purity and an innocence to these recordings, made at home in Los Angeles, that sits in stark contrast to the music Auf der Maur was making in the studio with Hole at the time. “I wrote these songs in the context of rising pressure from the major label-driven music industry on myself and my peers to make glossy hit songs to dominate radio airwaves,” says Auf der Maur. “These songs are the sound of my internal experimentation and a way of keeping the Montreal art girl alive inside. These sounds are the quiet and private side of the girl who joined the big American major label rock band.” Righteous. Color me intrigued.
Get the book of awesome 90’s (rock) music photographs, see the exhibit, and listen to the album.
Here’s a look at the cover artwork:
The BASS WOMB ROOM Tracklist
- Active Heart
- …And The Next Day
- Courtney Chimes In
- Desire is Critical
- In The Reflection
- Water Wars
- Flesh Flush
- Is She Is
- Billy Seoul Crowd
- Love Is The Drug
- Sparkle Bass
- Fancy Piece (Featuring The Hunger World)
- River’s Dream
- Sea of Tranquility
- Skip A Beat
Her site, her Instagram, her Linktree. And her Facebook.
Happy listening!
Scummy Water Tower Productions co-founder, reviewer, business manager, and editor. Thank you for visiting this site, scummywatertower.com, and YouTube for Water Tower Sessions and SWT Interviews. And all of our socials.
Questions, feedback, or more? Contact me: alex@scummywatertower.com
