Carla Bozulich
Evangelista

EMBARRASSMENT.
When I am faced with such a raw exercise of self-exposure, when the distance between representation and the living matter of which lives are layered is thin enough to become a deflowered and bleeding membrane, I feel a sense of embarrassment similar to what invades us when we become unwilling witnesses to absolute and painful intimacy.
It matters little that this is not an exercise in deliberate voyeurism.
It is not enough to recall that, after all, we have been invited by her to this invasion of her emotional territory.
That hers is a determined and explicit choice, a voluntary exhibition of the most stripped-down folds of a tormented story.
I listen to the leaden sky crashing into the empty space reverberating uncertain sounds that host a voice always on the verge of breaking.
Tension and release, scream and whisper.
Expressionism and a primitive sense of sacredness, physicality destined to testify through “martyrdom” its most sublime essence, grazing the dust to rise in fragile ascending spirals when it seems about to succumb.

A DARK CONSTELLATION
Released for the surprising Constellation on May 15, 2006, “Evangelista” is the solo debut album of Carla Bozulich, active for almost twenty years, first in Ethyl Meatplow and then in Geraldine Fibbers, two formations from the Los Angeles scene.
The scenario within which Bozulich’s vocal interpretation moves is set by members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Black Ox Orkestar, A Silver Mt. Zion, who orchestrate, often in the darkest and most sulfurous tones, 9 tracks that do not allow distracted and detached listening.
And they declare it right from the start, with the 9'22" of "Evangelist I", where the strings and the double bass prepare a space in which tension implodes, pierced by a song that becomes a scream, traversed by fragments of sinister sounds, that weave, together with an organ and chanting voices in the background, a disarming plot in its explicit function of tragic representation.
And the subsequent "Steal Away" offers a dried-up and transfigured version of a traditional blues, perhaps to define a sort of ideal reference to the deepest and shadowiest zones of the American musical tradition's soul.

ABANDONMENT
There is no way to reach the end of such an album except by accepting to abandon yourself to its mood, to the urgency that crosses it. When it becomes crackling and stunning rarefaction ("How To Survive Being Hit by Lightning") when it chooses the brief hesitant sigh of the night to dissolve the ghost of a whisper ("Inside Sleeps") or lets the voice be led among the naves evoked by an organ to launch its invective ("Baby, That’s The Creeps")
The fairly faithful cover of a track from Low’s last album ("Pissing") transitions to the final part, tempted first by an improbable heavenly figuration, liquid sounds and angelic voices ("Prince Of The World") then by a claustrophobic and confused environment, a mute reportage from the intersections between nightmare, dream, and wakefulness ("Nel’s Box").
To arrive at that “Evangelist II” where Carla's voice, first immersed in a corridor of synthetic sound, scratched and hissing, which dilutes to leave her alone, then surprisingly reveals itself relaxed and intimate.

I read online about the turbulences of her biography, a past of drug addiction and prostitution (excellent material for PR offices)
I find traces in her album of an approach not far from certain pages present in the albums of Nico, Jarboe, Cave, to name a few. An attitude to the “theatrical” and evocative use of sound partly present also in the works of her label mates. And a sense of collision and fusion between the work and the “religious” and tragic mystery of existence that sublimely accompanied the end of J. Cash.
And I don’t know how many stars to dedicate to “Evangelist.”
But even if it were just one, it would be TRUE.