January 22, 2003

By Will York

BASED ON HER band's music, you might expect Amber Asylum leader Kris Force to be a little more solemn and morbid than she really is. Yet after meeting her, you quickly set aside any hopes or fears that she's some sort of creepy character who dresses in all black, avoids exposure to sunlight, and grimly whispers stuff like, "Yeah, one time I had this job at the morgue...."

"I'm not very morbid," the violinist-guitarist-vocalist admits. "Although I'm kind of fascinated with people who are morbid. I met this woman Karen Greenleaf – she's fascinating."

Wait, wasn't that the woman who got written up in the Feral House anthology Apocalypse Culture for, uh, you know ...

"Yes, she lives in Colma, and she was arrested for stealing a body, and basically she molested this body like all weekend," Force confirms. "I met her once at a party. She came up to me and asked me something, and I said, 'Are you Karen Greenleaf? What was it like?' She was hilarious. She was just like some normal woman that you'd see at Safeway. Kind of spooky."

"Spooky," in the least hokey sense of the word, is a good way to describe a lot of Amber Asylum's music. "Moody," "nocturnal," "elegant," and, if you want to get fancy, "liturgical" are a few others that come to mind, certainly more so than any of the standard genre tags. While the group's output has alternately rubbed shoulders with neoromantic classical, post-rock, and so-called dark ambient (the section where you'll find their CDs at Amoeba), it doesn't comfortably fit into any of those categories. Force doesn't care what you call it, as long as you don't use the g-word.

"I don't know how we got classified as goth," Force groans. "Have these people listened to goth? Most of it's really empty and impersonal." Mention some of the goth-related bands they've been compared to, such as Dead Can Dance, and the resulting grimace on her face is impressive. "I don't even know how to respond to that," she says with a sigh.

Amber Asylum's upcoming show at Bottom of the Hill, with emphatically non-goth bands Burmese and Ten Grand, marks their first Bay Area performance in more than a year. It's also their first local show with the new rhythm section of drummer Sarah Wiener and bassist Lorraine Rath, both of whom joined last summer. The remaining member, cellist Jackie Gratz, has been a part of Force's group since 1997, a year after the first Amber Asylum recordings came out.

Freezing and restless

Prior to 1997, longtime Bay Area dweller Force was doing solo four-track recordings under the name Frozen in Amber, which is also the title of Amber Asylum's 1996 debut album (Misathropy). Over the years, she and Gratz have befriended and collaborated with a diverse batch of local musicians, from guitarist Steve Von Till and his band Neurosis – whose Neurot label is reissuing Frozen in Amber next month – to electronic music conceptualist Matmos, on whose 1998 album, The West, Force and Gratz play.

In fact, former visual art student Force credits Matmos's Martin Schmidt for getting her into recording music in the first place, back in the mid '80s. "We lived in this warehouse together where we had shows, a lot of industrial/experimental shows," she recounts. "And a lot of people don't understand, but if you've lived in California a long time, you understand that in the winter the house is not always a refuge from the cold. So I could see my breath inside – it was January or mid December – and I was sick and miserable and trying to make these drawings. It was just ridiculous, and Martin had this office downstairs in the garage that had this big heater. So I just planted myself there and wouldn't leave. I read all the manuals for his gear and started doing recordings."

The other main component of Force's musical education came in the more formal guise of one-on-one violin and voice lessons, which she took for a decade and a half. (For the past three years, she's been studying piano.) Given her background, and the obvious classical leanings in a lot of Amber Asylum's music, one wonders if Force ever had plans to become an honest-to-goodness classical musician.

"Well ... I sort of feel like I am," she says, politely correcting me. "I have performed recitals, a lot of them, and I do have a classical repertoire." And yet, as she notes, there is a division between the career of the strict classical performer and the path she's taken. "Most classical performers do not write music, have no knowledge of electronic music, no knowledge of producing music, and they're very myopic that way, spending five or six hours a day in a rehearsal room by themselves. That's how you get that kind of excellence. Whereas I [veered] away from that, so there was a lot of repertoire I just couldn't play because I didn't spend my time that way. I spent my time learning how to produce music and how to do sound design, how to play electrically ... and how to write."

"I think the only scene that I feel comfortable in is the metal scene. I tried to fit in, to be part of the indie scene, and I felt really rejected. I had moments where I was blatantly ridiculed as being a goth." Noting that it's more a marketing issue than a musical one, she adds, "I actually don't really care, but the metal scene is what embraced us, and I'd rather not resist that."

Metal connections

You won't find many distorted guitars in Amber Asylum's music, but the metal connection isn't so far-fetched. In addition to Rath's and Wiener's past metal associations – both were members of the Gault, and Wiener also played bass in local black-metal legends Weakling – several other Amber Asylum contributors have played in metal bands. Their previous bassist, Erica Stoltz, was a member of Lost Goat and Hammers of Misfortune; Neurosis's Von Till played on 1998's Songs of Sex and Death (Release); and guitarist John Cobbett, who will be joining the band onstage for part of the Jan. 26 show, is a pillar of the local metal scene, playing in a number of bands including Ludicra, Hammers of Misfortune, and Slough Feg.

Speaking of Cobbett, he recently collaborated with Force and Rath on a soundtrack for an A&E Biography episode on Sharon Tate, which aired last October. Considering the soundtrackish feel to much of Amber Asylum's music, that line of work makes sense. Explaining the state of mind she gets into to write music, Force says, "It's more like watching a movie for me – that kind of flicker in the film – than it is about ... dead people. All I have to do is start playing, and then I find that place. There's no ceremony or hoopla or ritual I use to acquire that state."

It's easy for Force to get into various states of mind. In the past, she was involved in remote viewing, a practice that the International Remote Viewing Association defines as "a mental faculty that allows a perceiver to describe or give details about a target that is inaccessible to normal senses due to distance, time, or shielding." How does this work? "You just close your eyes and look," Force says, laughing self-consciously. "You'll be given coordinates and someone will say, 'What do you see?' "

Like, miles away?

"Yeah, like in other countries. They use it in the military. I put it on my professional résumé under 'skills.' It's the last one listed. Almost no one has mentioned it."

"You have to be in a state of mind to do that," she continues. "You have to prepare a little bit. It's kind of like meditating. It's very close to the state of mind ... where music comes from."