Photo by Rachel Stern
EMILY WELLS
Forging a bridge between pop and chamber music, composer, producer, and video artist Emily Wells (she/her) builds songs from deliberate strata of vocals, synths, drums, piano, string and wind instruments. Her evocative music (described as “visionary” by NPR) and performances (called “quietly transfixing” by the New York Times) impel listeners to be attuned.
Wells’s latest release, the ten-song album Regards to the End, explores the AIDS crisis, climate change, and her lived experience watching the world burn. Along with a roster of contributors including her father, a French horn player and former music minister, she builds the songs on Regards to the End from deliberate strata of vocals, synths, drums, piano, string instruments (violin, cello, bass), and wind instruments (clarinet, flute, French horn). The music is numinous in part because the listening experience is a resoundingly bodied one. The vocals and winds, a strong presence on the album, foreground breath. Life—unsanitary, beautiful, persistent, brief—swells inside of every note. Drums tie us to the pulse of our heartbeats, rooting and grounding us.
Wells’s music is its own kind of spiritual communion, shot through with fierce empathy and justified rage. Speaking about her 2019 album This World is Too _____ For You in an interview with Flaunt, Wells said: “Each day I encountered a form of friendship with all those who had been artists before me, all reaching out to touch this thing we don’t name unless we call it god. You heard the cry and you want to cry back.” This deeply felt connection with artists across time is also knit into the fabric of Regards to the End. The album is informed by the lives and work of choreographers and visual artists, particularly those with ties to the AIDS crisis. A work of radical empathy, Regards to the End foregrounds the power of art, critique, and care to connect and perhaps redeem us.
Pitchfork concludes, “Surprise and precision are Wells’ greatest assets as a composer, and Regards to the End is filled with both.”