Former Hole and Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf der Maur has announced the forthcoming release of Bass Womb Room, featuring her first new music in over 15 years.
The album, Bass Womb Room: My ‘90s 4-Track Demos x Field Recordings, to give it its full title, will incorporate old and new music, and include previously unreleased four-track demos Auf der Maur recorded during the ’90s, in addition to eight new ‘interlude’ compositions created for an upcoming exhibition of the Canadian musician’s photography.
“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,” Auf der Maur says in a statement. “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.”
Auf der Maur first spoke about the project during a March interview with Louder.
“The museum exhibit of my photography that’s coming out with my book [My ’90s Rock Photographs]opens in Toronto in September, and it’s up for a year, and then it will travel internationally,” she told this writer. “It’s a very large exhibit, and one room is an ode to my bass and the fans, and it’s called the Bass Room, and I’m building a sonic score to the installation. So I’ve actually been in the studio, and I’m returning to music, but in a very bass forward way. It will be an hour long piece that goes throughout the exhibit, an audio journey.
“But, and you’re the first person I’m telling this, I also found some of my early four-track song recordings from the ’90s, and they are actually working really well within this ambient score. So I am going to be releasing, with the photo book, a new body of sound. And I’m really excited about it, because I think it’s the way that I’m going to ease myself back into sound. I need to come back in through the innocence place.”
Bass Womb Room will be released on September 4 via Envision Records. Melissa Auf der Maur: My ‘90s Rock Photographs opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario on September 2.