Melissa Auf der Maur is opening another window into her ’90s creative life. The former Hole and Smashing Pumpkins bassist will release BASS WOMB ROOM: My ’90s 4-Track Demos x Field Recordings on Sept. 4 via Envision Records, marking her first new music in more than 15 years.
The digital and cassette release pairs seven previously unheard four-track demos Auf der Maur recorded at home during the 1990s with eight newly created sound pieces made for her upcoming museum exhibition, Melissa Auf der Maur: My ’90s Rock Photographs, which opens Sept. 2 at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario. A companion 240-page photography book of the same name will follow Sept. 8 through DelMonico Books/D.A.P. and the AGO.
The announcement arrives following the March release of the musician’s memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry, which inadvertently sparked rumors of a Hole reunion which were quickly shot down by Courtney Love. Auf der Maur famously joined Hole for the band’s 1994 tour in support of the album Live Through This, mere weeks after the deaths of both Love’s husband Kurt Cobain and Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff. She remained in the group for five years and was featured prominently on its 1998 album Celebrity Skin.
Instead of revisiting that catalog, however, BASS WOMB ROOM looks inward. Recorded on a Tascam four-track in her Los Angeles living room, the demos capture Auf der Maur experimenting with acoustic guitar, bass, layered vocals and lo-fi tape manipulation, including reversing cassettes and pitch-shifting. Drawing directly from her diaries, the songs reflect on everything from blistered fingers and desire to the moon landing, while field recordings of everyday sounds — a dripping faucet, the click of her camera shutter — were sampled from a cassette dictaphone she carried alongside her camera.
“There has been no modern intervention for this release other than mastering,” the announcement notes.
The companion installation expands on those recordings. Co-produced with Alex Crow, BASS WOMB ROOM surrounds visitors with video captured from Auf der Maur’s years touring with Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, including footage shot from a Handycam perched atop her bass amp during concerts. Those audience recordings are woven together with a recurring heartbeat, symbolizing both “the mother of all instruments” — the bass — and the womb.
For Auf der Maur, the demos represent a private counterpoint to the high-pressure world of major-label alternative rock. “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,” she said. “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.”