Producer, cellist and singer Laura Wolf picks apart genres and stitches them back together again; the result is her signature off-kilter chamber-pop arrangements packed with delicious sound design.
A frequent collaborator in-studio and on stage (credits include Feverkin, Lawrence, Matt Pond PA) Laura’s solo project is a lifelong playground for experimentation and homespun production. Sometimes saturated with cello, often driven by synths and programmed drums, Laura’s pop-collages always embrace glitchy sound design, orchestral fragments and lighter-than-air vocals. Her live performances, a visual as much as an auditory experience, blend analog, digital and whimsical experimentalism.
Shelf Life is the latest snapshot in Laura’s evolution from lifelong classical musician to electronic producer. The album, primarily self-recorded in 2020 her parent’s attic near New Haven and her apartment in Providence, is an intricate patchwork of playful sound design, orchestral fragments, industrial samples and intimate vocals.
Last month, NPR’s All Songs Considered described Laura as “a classical musician also in love with sound manipulation.”
In 2019, after being bedridden by an emergency intestinal surgery and in the wake of canceling a cross-country tour and move, Laura was forced to reimagine her musical identity as an artist who performs to one that thrives autonomously in the home studio format. For the greater part of the next year, obsessed with climbing a steep music production learning curve, she spent every waking moment in her parent’s attic (turned makeshift recording studio) teaching herself Ableton, recording and electronic production.
This time of rapid creative evolution produced 2 EPs: the first, Artifacts (2021) was the charmingly (but accidentally) glitchy predecessor to the more intentional follow-up, Shelf Life. From its sound palette to its lyrics, Shelf Life is a gradual unspooling of the synergy between original source and manipulated sample, fact and memory, which aptly weaves the fabric of Laura’s musical DNA. Having spent the past year journeying through family folklore and genetic testing, Laura wrote Shelf Life as a way to mourn her maternal grandmother and grapple with genetic disease.
Shelf Life is about life after trauma and what to do with the decay we’re dealt
In the winter of 2021 Laura teamed up with Zubin Hensler (The Westerlies, Half Waif, Fleet Foxes) to mix her arrangements into these EPs that pay homage to their own patchwork process.
Shelf Life is out June 2nd via Whatever’s Clever.