Melissa Auf der Maur Preps First New Music in Over 15 Years

Alt-rock stalwart Melissa Auf Der Maur, who played with Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, is prepping a new project, Bass Womb Room, that will feature her first new music in over 15 years.

The album — titled Bass Womb Room: My ‘90s 4-Track Demos x Field Recordings — is set to feature a mix of old and new music. It will include several previously unreleased four-track demos, which Auf der Maur wrote and recorded during the Nineties, as well as eight new “interlude” compositions created for an upcoming photography exhibit/installation.

Auf der Maur recorded the old demos during the Nineties in her Los Angeles living room on a Tascam 4-track machine, using primarily acoustic guitar and layered vocals, but also bass, keyboard, and field recordings of quotidian sounds like a leaking faucet or camera shutter. She further fleshed out the demos with “four-track tricks,” like flipping the cassette backwards and pitch shifting. As for lyrics, Auf der Maur sometimes laid her vocals down with stream-of-consciousness improvisations, or sometimes she read straight from her daily diary. 

“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 said 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.” 

As for the “interlude” compositions, while they were made recently to accompany Auf der Maur’s upcoming photo exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario, they too incorporate archival material. Back when she was playing with Hole and Smashing Pumpkins, Auf der Maur would put a video camera on her bass amp to film the audience; she used audio from those old recordings in her new compositions, sampling and connecting them with a bass-like heartbeat.

Bass Womb Room the album is set to arrive Sept. 4 via Envision Records, while the photo exhibit/installation opens Sept. 2. An accompanying photobook will be published Sept. 8, as well.