Carla Bozulich

Beginning with her first Constellation release in 2006, Carla Bozulich's Evangelista project has steadily been gaining recognition for its complex beauty and fierce, raging appeals. Bozulich has been knocking these and other ideas in art, writing and conceptual performance into form for two decades (Neon Veins, Ethyl Meatplow, The Geraldine Fibbers, Scarnella, Red Headed Stranger). Evangelista is the best and the brightest, a brash and dandy band of adventurous risk takers. Music/sound that sometimes whispers and licks, sometimes pulls the listener so close that it is hard to breathe, sometimes screams in ritual satisfaction. A consistent bucking of categorization ensues. When pressed, Carla calls it Gospel Noise.

Evangelista landed on the cover of UK music magazine The Wire in June 2008, following the release of the group's second album, Hello Voyager (which also made The Wire and several other mags' year-end lists). Bozulich/Evangelista has also recently appeared at numerous prestigious music festivals, including FIMAV (Musique Actuelle) in Canada, Le Weekend in Scotland and the Ruhrtriennale in Germany.

The new Evangelista album, Prince Of Truth, stays true to the band's uncompromising and compelling combination of delicate coaxing love and wicked cathartic awakening sonic voyage. Not so much confessional as ritual/processional and invitational says Bozulich: "inviting the listener to come clean, to defy or just be near people you believe in, to sit down, all of us together and make sense of the fact that there is no logic and perhaps no Truth at the base of anything, that we must open up and up and up because if we do not we are just fish gone belly-up in the stream - there is a Prince inside us that will grow into nothing more or less than an everyday person moving free, armed with the salvation of sound and love."

 
Having toured extensively throughout North America and Europe during the year-and-a-half following the release of Hello Voyager, Evangelista has coalesced around a core trio, with Bozulich and bassist Tara Barnes now joined by keyboardist/sound artist Dominic Cramp. Returning to Montreal and the Hotel2Tango studio where the previous two Evangelista records were made, the new album was co-written by the above trio along with several members of their extended Montreal family, most notably Lisa Gamble (who played everything from musical saw to bike wheel). Gamble also occasionally joins the band on tour (as do a wide cast of misfits from around the globe). Other musicians that are featured on Prince Of Truth include Shahzad Ismaily, Thierry Amar, Nadia Moss and Ches Smith. Bozulich also rallied additional contributions from Nels Cline, Ezra Buchla, Devin Hoff, Jessica Catron and more.

With Prince Of Truth, Evangelista is something more intense, more committed, more complex and more sonically and compositionally obsessive than ever. Conventional song structure is mostly absent - the pieces are built from an extremely diverse set of sound sources, taking shape through layers of accumulation and juxtaposition, foreground and background, sudden shifts, suspensions and dissolutions - and Carla's commanding voice and brilliant lyrics.

Prince Of Truth springs from Evangelista's instinct-driven obsessions. In noise, haunting pop, hard rock, musique concrete or the occasional ethereal insect requiem Bozulich still manages to channel the incantatory/seductive/soul persona of the classic chanteuse. Evangelista have made an album of searing and beguiling depth, the spoils of a huge, phenomenal group of musicians, forging some kind of experimental gothic soul sound for our impossible times.