Wow & Flutter 016 | Lisa Bella Donna
Wow & Flutter 016 | Lisa Bella Donna
A surprise Halloween cassette release, musique concrète, and ghost stories from Appalachia
When Lisa Bella Donna sent over an early listen of Altitudes, I opened the front windows of my house. Unseasonably warm for autumn, with a backdrop of red leaves falling, I knew these three compositions couldn’t be contained to just the inside. Sonic specters that needed a way out, and then up— or possibly through. Lisa is very good at building a tension that calls for introspection— your own soft whispers of “is there more?”
W&F: Hi Lisa, thanks for chatting with us this week. Do you have any Halloween traditions in your family other than year-round sonic witchcraft?
Photo: Jaclyn Sosnowski
Lisa Bella Donna: Warmest greetings, Carolyn! Thank you for including me in Wow and Flutter. I truly appreciate it!
We get into lots of typical autumn-time fun: Pumpkin carving, candle making, and other crafts. Lots of crockpot dishes and baking homemade bread. We hike around the woods where we live and gather lots of different leaves, cones, seeds, and berries, then make potpourri with our finds.
It’s fun to huddle together with the oil lamps around a little TV/VCR combo on our kitchen table and watch horror and mystery favorites. Things like Dracula has Risen from the Grave, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Salem’s Lot, and episodes of The Night Gallery are always mainstays.
We invite friends out to camp on our property and enjoy bonfires and local apple cider. The kids, of course, will roast marshmallows and make s’mores.
It’s great to get out and enjoy as many afternoons as possible, totally offline, hiking out to the lake. We all bring a backpack filled with our favorite books, rations, snacks, and a thermos of hot tea or cider. When we find a cozy spot, it’s time to camp out, relax, and enjoy the beautiful fall day.
Sometimes we’ll venture out further from home and explore the deep woods in search of spooky sights. It’s amazing how many old, empty churches, shops, and graveyards you will encounter. It’s a little eerie, yet equally peaceful.
One day, we hiked for what seemed like hours in these areas and came across a spooky tiny, old library in the middle of the woods! It was such an amazing find; peering through the broken window panes and seeing endless shelves of books damaged by the elements, frozen in time. I really wanted to go inside to see if any books could be salvaged, but there was a very eerie presence surrounding the site. In the end, we chose to leave it exactly as we found it. By the time we hiked back to the clearing near our truck, dawn was upon us. We looked up and there was a falling star shooting across the cold, crisp sky! It was a really special thing to witness after such a spooky exploration.
W&F: Tell us a good ghost story from your life if you have one!
LBD: Absolutely! Many years ago, I was traveling solo to an area in West Virginia near where much of my family is from. Initially, I was looking for a camping spot to post up and compose but evening caught up to me, so I drove until I found a spot to park my van, stretch for a while, and check the map to exactly how far I traveled. I eventually found such a spot: I was in Hazelgreen Cemetery.
After a nice break from the road, I realized there was no one around. It seemed truly desolate. There were no houses nearby; it was so quiet and peaceful. At that moment, it was exactly what I was looking for. I just decided I would back my van into the far end of the cemetery and post up there until early light.
I lifted the cemetery gate and backed my van in. It felt very serene really. I never heard one vehicle pass the entire time I was there.
Once parked, I opened the side door of the van, pulled my canopy out, and posted it off the side of the van. Then, I set up my table, lawn chair, and Coleman stove and started percolating some coffee. I hung some lamps and started to dig into a good book as I cooked up some dinner on the other burner. All seemed right, I was about as far from anyone as I could be. Just listening to the leaves fall and scatter across the lawn. Feeling peaceful and refreshed.
After dinner, I took a walk around the graveyard and observed some of the headstones. Most had departed in the early 20th century. It projected a plethora of pictures in my mind as to what it would have been like to have lived out here during my grandparents' time.
I planned on packing up and heading into my van so I could get back to my book and warm up from the cold when I got back from my walk. Evening had settled in when I arrived, so I grabbed my lantern.
Suddenly, the wind picked up and the clouds departed to reveal a fully bright, RED MOON. Surrounded by crystalline stars, it made everything around me appear red.
When I was young, a relative once told me that when the red moon is full and fills the landscape with red light, all the spirits of the restless dead return to their graves and try to find their way back to their time-space on Earth. That story chilled me to the bone. After years of not thinking about it, there I was, in the absolute middle of nowhere, in the after-hours of the October night, surrounded by long lost graves, under a full red moon.
I started to feel a strong sense of paranoia take over and decided I should just drive on and find another spot to crash. I went back to the gate to get it open so I could drive through. I reached for the hinge… it was locked!
There was no lock in sight as I entered earlier that evening. The lock was so old and rusted, but I could not open it by hand. I raced back to my van to grab a mallet and pry bar to bust it open. I was cold and trembling in regret as I hurried back up the lane to work on getting the lock off.
I reached the midpoint back to the gate when, suddenly, under the looming, bright red moon, knee-high channels of thick, dense fog began to swirl from around the tombstones, quickly moving in my direction. I became completely mesmerized and could not take my eyes off the fog as it rolled over the slopes of gravestones and slowly surrounded me. At one point, I was completely immersed in thick fog. It felt like fingers were touching me; prickling at me, instigating a response. Then, out of the silence, I heard faint, malignant tones. Almost like scrubbing an old reel-to-reel tape over the heads slowly. Before I had a chance to respond or run, the fog slowly dissolved all around me.
Suddenly, the sky opened revealing red, green, and purple streams of light. In the blink of an eye, the streams were gone and remnants of the fog turned into floating orbs, oscillating around the cemetery. I could still hear the faint tape-scrubbing sounds, but they were right on the edge of my hearing. As my ears reached to recognize the sounds, I heard people crying and sobbing. {It still gives me chills remembering the sounds as I write this.) The oscillating orbs continued to float. They were dense and murky. As I gazed in wonder, it appeared as if there were distorted faces in them. Some with hollowed eyes and human expressions of anguish; distant souls, lost in an enigmatic crypt of the everlasting countryside. I could feel the weight and depth of their sadness. I could feel, what seemed like, slow, shattering glass enveloping my body. I was frozen in pure terror and mystery. My head started to spin and I thought, for a moment, I might faint; just about the last thing I wanted to do.
The moon was gone. Thick, obsidian clouds turned everything around me into silent blackness. At that point, I wasn't sure what was real or an illusion. I was cold, drenched in sweat, and my mouth was bone dry. My lantern went out, so I started back down the path toward my van. As I stumbled in the darkness, I was sobbing, still spinning from what I had just witnessed.
When I got back to my van and opened the door, a violet, pre-dawn sky started to appear from the surrounding meadows. Tears of joy streamed down my face as I turned the key in the ignition and let the engine warm up. I packed up camp and made my way to the gate to deal with the old, weathered lock, only to find— there was no lock! There was no sign of it on the ground, or anywhere else for that matter. I pushed the gate open and, at last, drove my van out of the cemetery. I had never felt so relieved in my life!
With my van fully outside the cemetery’s threshold, I got out to close the gate and look back on Hazelgreen Cemetery. The beautiful, multi-colored dawn was opening up in the crisp, cold air. Snowflakes began to fall and obscure the fallen leaves. A helicopter rose over the horizon and soared off into the timberline. Cleansing the space all around, I closed the gate and took off to meet the morning elsewhere.
My van was toasty by now, and my tape deck was turned up loud. The road led me to the Kanawha River where I took time to listen, reflect, and write down this haunting story.
This was just one of many supernatural happenings I experienced while growing up and fearlessly exploring West Virginia's timeless hills. I'm forever grateful for those moments, even if some are ones I’d rather not repeat. (I do miss that van, though.) Photophobia, an album I released in 2022, is an aural impression/translation of three of the backwoods hauntings I once voyaged through. These hills do indeed have eyes, and they’re watching you…
W&F: In your opinion which synthesizer offers the spookiest sound palette?
LBD: ARP 2600, EML 200, Moog Grandmother, and Mellotron M400.
W&F: You're releasing Altitudes to cassette today! I had an early listen and felt very The Shining about it. While I was listening I had my windows open— every leaf falling, every bird touching down felt ominous. What is Altitudes about?
LBD: Thanks for taking the time to listen to it and taking the voyage. Yes! It’s being released through Imperial Emporium out of Akron, Ohio. They also reissued my debut 1994 cassette release Snowy Dreamscapes. I’m always grateful and proud to be included in Fej’s roster of cassette releases.
Altitudes is a very holistic and obscure album. It’s intended to be an equally wild and wonderful sonic voyage; a triptych of three entirely different directions in aural art. I’d describe this record as a greatest hits of early electronic music techniques in tape-based composition; a study of ghosts and apparitions of Appalachian hollows. I have taken all of my album sessions offline this year, recording and mixing exclusively on hardware equipment. The computer only comes into play for final stage mastering and cleaning up. It’s been really good for my creative flow.
The opening piece “Piece for Tape Recorder” is exactly that: completely composed and realized on 2-channel tape. I started this piece in early December of 2023 and, slowly but surely, cut and pasted each individual section with a razor blade, splicing block, and sensing foil. I sort of lost track, but, somewhere around early April, I had finished the entire three-minute piece and transferred it to a 2-Track DSD stereo master recorder to retain all of the tone, texture, and dynamics of the original reel-to-reel tape.
It’s been a long time since I’ve really rolled up my sleeves and performed true musique concrète. It was a great reminder that, while it is a very painstaking way to realize a piece of music, it offers an entirely different and vast constellation of ideas and concepts in stereo or quadraphonic sound. There’s a really rewarding meditation, and I will always love this kind of kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria musical sound stage.
“Faces Of Death” is the piece on this album that took the longest to compose and complete. It’s a tone poem for strings, organ, and tape. I was able to realize this piece through a very involved and personal approach I have spent years developing. It has been an enjoyable challenge.
In short, each orchestral passage was performed and recorded onto a 2-track recorder (In this case, all tracks were recorded and mixed on an Otari MX 5050 2-track reel-to-reel). Then, each track was painstakingly edited, filed, and stored as a series of stereo digital playback modules in my modular system. Once all stereo modules were set up, patched, and mixed into a stereo mixer, the heart of the composing and arranging began by creating a series of tone rows on a series of Moog 960 sequencers. These control the pitch, duration, and repetition of each voice in the “orchestra." Then, these sequential passages were performed and mixed live back to the Otari 2-track and manually logged and filed for further final placement in the master 24-track digital recorder (HD24XR) where the final mix performance took place.
After the better part of the year, December 2023 to September 2024, I returned to continue each passage in the first movement. Around the 3:00 mark, I bussed the mix to a tape loop and transitioned to the second movement where the deepest depths of the piece began to reveal themselves.
The concept of “Faces of Death” is about traveling through deep Appalachian towns and hollows and exploring long abandoned places. It’s a very unique experience spending time in these locations, witnessing the occluded stories of lives once lived. Trying to stay put and wait until musical and sonic impressions unfurl from these eerie inhabitants is equally chilling and creatively stimulating.
The murky, haunted passageways of the third movement are based on a theme I wrote and recorded on a very old Mellotron M400. It’s so grotesque and eerily alive as each musical passage unfolds. The piece concludes with chapel bells, Korg synthesizers, and ICU heart monitors, transfigured into a funeral in the phantasms of the mind.
“Isosceles” is an electronic composition for 2-channel tape conceived over a week-long session in my studio in early Spring of 2024. All sound sources are coming from the large modular wall in my studio. 32 voices carefully mixed and performed live to a 2-channel DSD recorder, creating a cataleptic, yet meditative journey up to the snow-covered mountain peaks of the lovely album cover painting by artist Dean Cline. I absolutely love and am inspired by his work. There are many of his original paintings proudly displayed throughout our home.
During the conclusion of this piece, we finally reach and rest in beautifully ornamented mountainscapes. Here, we have reached altitude for transcendence and eclipse into the celestial realm. Free from the mysteries of fear and unresolved conclusions of our past. Our destiny is the sky; beyond the gates of spiritual confluence, passing softly through the winter winds, away and beyond into their prism of light through eminent ascension.
This piece was an absolute pleasure to realize. It was a very fun session in the early hours of an April dawn.
W&F: This album feels so orchestral— let's talk about the lesser loved-on ARP String Ensemble (no shade to the 2600), because I love that machine. There's also a Moog tympani patch in there?
LBD: The ARP String Ensemble will forever be one of my favorite instruments. It is my sound, no question. It immediately summons an aural photograph of many skies within the music. It’s just crystal clear where you need it. In the lower and middle register, it can become a fragrant and textural forest of autumnal collectives. It’s a magical yet very simple instrument. Essentially, a portable home organ from early 1970s Italy.
The Moog tympani is an old Moog drum with a very sensitive drum head/membrane connected to both VCO & VCA Envelopes. This makes a synthesizer sound like a concert tympani, which I implement often. Aided by some parametric equalizers and delays, you can truly capture the realism of an orchestra drum on a theatre stage.
W&F: Droning masterfully is a real discipline and task— what goes into a good drone soup?
LBD: Discrete voices that are carefully placed in the stereo or quadraphonic landscape. A patient sensitivity in change of pitch or position. Touch, tone, and taste.
W&F: You gave us the perfect soundtrack for All Hallow's Eve— but in your opinion, what's the perfect dish and drink to take it in with?
LBD: Please enjoy this cassette outdoors on a cold, crisp night. Have a kettle of warm apple cider on some bricks or stones in the fire bed. Make some jasmine rice over the fire and drain. Place in your favorite bowl and add a fresh tin of Fishwife Smoked Rainbow Trout or Sichuan Chili Crisp Salmon. Spritz with fresh lemon, basil, and enjoy. Make a fresh cocktail with your favorite bourbon and a splash of warm, fire-kissed apple cider, or just enjoy the cider on its own.
Kick back and come far away with me, beyond the veil to a haunting stereo space with safe and kind destinations.
W&F: Leave us with a few suggested albums to play for Halloween…
LBD: Here are a few of my favorites I always return to this time of year:
Night Of The Living Dead Soundtrack (1968)
Joseph DoLuca - Evil Dead Soundtrack (1982)
Des Morts (Of the Dead) Soundtrack / Belgium (1979)
Paul Lemel: Dramaturgy / Cosmogony (1973)
Shostakovich - String Quartets - Fitzwilliam Quartet (1979)
Black Sabbath - Born Again (1983)
Dawn Of The Dead Soundtrack (1977) (Trunk Records / WaxWorks)
George Crumb - The Haunted Landscape (1984)
Lisa Bella Donna - Nyctophillia (2021) - Hypnosis (2022)
Blessed Death - Kill Or Be Killed (1985)
The Exorcist Soundtrack - (1973)
Morton Subotnick - Touch (1972)
Patty Waters - Sings (1966)
Mercyful Fate - Melissa (1983)
Harry Summon - Salem’s Lot (1979)
Slayer - Hell Awaits (1985)
Goblin - Suspiria (1977)
Mort Garson - Black Mass Lucifer (1971)
Tangerine Dream - Zeit (1972)
Possessed - 7 Churches (1985)
Voodoo Ceremony in Haiti (1974) (Olympic Records)
Christian Gaubert - The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane Soundtrack (1976)
Connect with Lisa Bella Donna:
Purchase Altitudes on Bandcamp.
Lisa Bella Donna on Instagram.
Lisa Bella Donna in Tape Op.