Into the Maelstrom: An Interview with Amanda Votta

“Detroit and Liverpool have this commonality with this river wrapping around the day and it affects everything in the city,” says Amanda Votta, who has lived on Merseyside periodically for the last 18 months. “The river exhales, the city inhales. With that as this constant background, it’s sort of dislocation… am I here, or am I back there? Where the city can feel like it’s suspended in some kind of moment, because just the smell of the river coming through the open window forms this bubble where Liverpool exists. It exists as a place in England, but it’s also outside of things because of its environment.”

This year with three albums spanning across as many projects, Votta has been one of the most crucial voices from the esoteric underground. On a Saturday evening in early November, we’re talking all about it over a few pints in The Old Bank Alehouse – a pub situated in the Liverpool suburb of Aigburth.

There’s chatter all around as Votta elaborates on a journey which has led to her most creative period as a recording artist. From the void-like sonics of Deep Fade to the beautifully deranged The Spectral Light and most recently I Am Providence, Votta explains the inspirations behind her work, including her geographical history which has seen the Detroit-born artist experience life in many places across the world.

The environment Votta speaks of is essential in her work. Delving back into her history, and this level of creative output hasn’t always been free-flowing; the years following her 2013 album, The Wood Beyond the World as The Floating World – Votta’s “dreamier and ephemeral” side hustle – creatively a little scarcer.

“I remember at some point there was a plan for another The Floating World album that I was supposed to start working on,” says Votta. “But I just wasn’t happy with it, and I started doing some other things, like experimenting with different ways of making music, because I got bored and frustrated. I felt like I had done everything I could possibly do with it, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do next.”

Votta began her PhD in Medical Anthropology at Brown University and started recording the next The Floating World album, Impermanence, in October 2019. But following a host of challenges beyond her control, it wouldn’t be released until last year via New York label, Fiadh Productions. “The first song on that album was the first that I had made in years that I actually liked,” she says.

Five years from start finish, and in a climate where art is continuously rejected by the world at large, most artists would have sat dormant or threw it away completely. Not Votta. Her DIY ethos saw her release the self-titled album as Cruxis, the black metal crust punk collaboration alongside Dok-tor, which ended up being released just months prior to Impermanence (also via Fiadh).

It was these projects that were the catalyst to Votta exploring further afield. Firstly, again by rewinding back, this time to 2021 where The Spectral Light released their debut EP, 10000 Stars. Alongside Votta’s long-time collaborator Neddal Ayad, it was the beginning of the journey for many listeners of her work (including myself).

The residual of The Spectral Light eventually leaked into Deep Fade. The Votta-led project that again features Ayad alongside fellow noise-wrangler, Grey Malkin. “By the time the first Deep Fade album came out [Line of Flight], I was like, ‘This can’t be The Floating World anyway, because this isn’t escapism so much as it is a reaction to a lot of stuff that had been going on.’ It was in a different emotional tone,” says Votta, also speaking of things changing with time, which has now seen Deep Fade become the vital pillar in her creative sound world. “I didn’t really know what it was,” she offers. “I was just doing music, because I was sick of not doing music. I wanted to show myself that I could do something that was different.”

Line of Flight and its follow-up Further (also released 2024) took doom and folk to the most brutal frontiers. Stretching and bending notes in ways in unique ways, it saw Deep Fade intersecting folk with no-wave, totally blowing the field wide open. In the case of Further, dubbed as “lighthouse drone”, it still stands as an album that is truly one-of-a-kind.

“That all happened almost by accident,” explains Votta. “I was having this moment of being really obsessed with lighthouses. I wanted to go live in a lighthouse, so I started going to them to sing. All the vocals are recorded either outside of or just inside lighthouses. There was one I went to in Wales when I was here last summer, the Point of Ayre, and it’s because of coastal erosion to shore when the high tide is in, that it’s in the water. I was completely blown away by that as a concept, what that can mean, what that kind of imagery it can convey.”

Combining these ecological eventualities with folk music aren’t foreign in the new music landscape, but given the opaque limits that both Deep Fade and The Spectral Light reach, few have mirrored the results. It got me curious as to whether folk music was a key source of inspiration during Votta’s formative years. “Actually, no,” she says. “When I was growing up, I was hearing a lot of jazz and blues. Folk music wasn’t even part of my awareness until much, much later, and even when I was making The Floating World stuff… weird folk, hauntology. I think that part of that is definitely there.”

Votta attributes Deep Fade and The Spectral Light’s folk leanings to Ayad. “Being from Newfoundland, he has been exposed to a lot more folk music than me. I think him having that as this background noise and me not really knowing what I’m doing with things that you could call folk… what we end up doing is this weirdly deconstructed, messed up sort of version of it, because we both come to it in an untraditional way.”

Hauntology is another focal point in both projects, which echoes Votta’s sentiments. “One of the main things that we both take from that is the embeddedness in something. When you listen to folk records, like in a room and the chair somebody is sitting in… sometimes you can tell there’s a window open, or you hear that there’s somebody else in the room just because of subtle movements. I am obsessed with that,” says Votta. “To me, that’s what this whole thing about hauntology is. And now you’re hearing it 30 years later… this weird ghost of sound in these albums, haunting the music.”

It’s this unvarnished approach that gives Votta’s work a deeper reality. “There’s nothing I’ve ever recorded or released that I’ve cleaned up really nice. I’ll open the window while I’m recording things, just because I think that it matters in some way… what happens around you while you’re doing it, like they did, that matters to me, too.”

Equipment and recording techniques add another layer of reality to Votta’s work, who says that “to make music, you do it with whatever you have.” As well as recording, Votta mixes, masters and makes videos for all her work, too. “I learned how to do those things for this because I’ve never had a lot of money in my life,” she says. “It’s partly that, yes, this is a DIY thing. This is me, or if Neddal and Grey are involved, this is our thing, my thing. If it’s going to be what it should be, then one of us has to do it.”

Talk moves to her geographical influences where, in Detroit, Votta lived a couple of blocks away from Marshall Mathers III. “I lived near downtown… my dad’s house was on Bradford in Detroit, and if you walked across the street and through the alley, there was his house. He had the same house number, almost on his street as my house was. My friend’s older brothers knew him. We didn’t give too much of a shit because we were just like wild, rabid girls running around causing absolute fucking havoc,” laughs Votta.

“There’s this perception of Detroit that it’s really unsafe. And there’s ways in which that’s true, but there’s also ways in which it’s just a place, and life happens, you know? You run around the neighborhood, get into trouble, and the same shit that happens everywhere else. It’s not all horror all the time.”

Votta began moving around in the mid-’90s, firstly to West Palm Beach, Florida. “It was so different… like this big open, flat land and hot and humid. You’d come home at night and there’d be an alligator in the road,” she says, before moves to Attleboro, Massachusetts, Albany, New York, then back to Florida in Orlando and Miami before moving back and forth between Michigan (Lansing, Grosse Pointe Ooods), Florida (Greenacers) and Massachusetts (New Bedford, Hyannis and Beverly) before living in Lowell – the home of Jack Kerouac. “We used to go visit his grave and leave him coins and stuff like all of that,” she laughs.

After briefly living in Salem, Massachusetts then back to Detroit for six months, it was Votta’s move to Mississauga in Ontario, Canada where she began recording music. “People think that Canada and the U.S. are a lot alike, and there’s ways in which they are, but not at all in a lot of others. Socially and culturally, it’s very different. The things that people care about prioritise are very different.”

Votta says she had always written songs since her childhood but had never recorded anything until she began living in Canada. “I used to make up songs in my head, out of the noise of the city, like the construction, the buses, people yelling, and I would just turn it into a song in my head.”

The sound of industry is an interesting point, a direct influence of the immediate surroundings of blue-collar and the working class. “I still can’t make a song without thinking about those sounds. Even when it was The Floating World, it was a lot more ethereal, it was still just an abstracted version of all of that noise of the city,” says Votta, also recalling times when she would take walks with father down the railroad tracks and her obsession with hearing trains from her grandparents’ house in Detroit late at night.

“I always thought of The Floating World as being pastoral industrial. You have these people who don’t live in cities and don’t realise how much nature still exists there. There are hawks, foxes, there’s wildlife. We have storms and seasons too in the city, and things change. For some reason people divide the two… there has to be this rural, pastoral thing, and then there a city thing,” says Votta. “Part of why you hear stuff in albums I make that’s just part of the environment, because the sound that happens around you is so important. I can hear wind, and it’s all of a sudden it’s 1992.”

Through the first two Deep Fade albums alongside the excellent new release as The Spectral Light, Obliteration (via Tyneside label, Cruel Nature Records), it’s this gritty, open-ended approach that moves beyond what many in modern Britain construe as folk. Something these days where it feels like many of its practitioners derive from the middle class, escaping the city for a slower life in pastoral milieus. There’s a separation in the art, where so many compartmentalise their past and present, which doesn’t always make for the most honest art.

“I think there is something artificially constructed about that, too,” agrees Votta. “You have this idea that it’s this way, and then you just act as though it’s that way, without actually acknowledging and experiencing how it really is every day of your life, whether you’re there or not, because your perception of it doesn’t really matter. It’s going to be what it is, whether you see it or not.”

For Votta, living in Canada shaped a lot of her learning about the environment in which to make music. “You hear it, so instead of cutting that stuff out, I just put reverb on it, and then it becomes part of this song,” she says, recalling a recording session in a basement in the middle of winter and hearing the neighbour down the street shoveling snow. “It was amazing to me,” she says.

From Cananda, Votta made the move to Sweden in 2006 where she would spend the next 10 years, meeting like-minded folk from the cult label, Cold Meat Industry – home to the likes of Arcana, Sophia and Karjalan Sissit. “I say band names, but these were people, and there were a lot of other people there that I would see all the time. Peter [Bjärgö] from Arcana had a studio at that time, Erebus Adora. You would just go there and hang out as people do. That was another experience that I think shaped how I do things a lot.”

Votta recalls a moment where she got talking to Bjärgö about “of all things, AC/DC!” and, more specifically, how they mastered the art of space and music. “But not necessarily in those specific terms. The silence is the spaces. That’s a song,” explains Votta, who began adopting this approach to her own work. “Moments that aren’t music, not even the sound of a room, but a moment that a note is dying and the other one hasn’t happened yet. What happens in that space is that you don’t fill it with anything!”

Only when Votta highlights this does it become obvious on the likes of Further and The Spectral Lights’ Obliteration. “At the beginning of some of the songs, there’s this briefest moment of nothing happening before it starts. And even in some of them, there’s a very long period where there’s almost nothing happening before something happens,” she says, noting that it’s a sensibility that both she and Ayad share.

After residing in Sweden, Votta moved backed to America, firstly in Beverly, Massachusetts, then back to Salem, Massachusetts before landing in Providence, Rhode Island where she continues to study on scholarship at Brown, which has led her Liverpool where she is in the process of completing her PhD.

“I had this idea that I wanted to get my master’s degree, and I was going to be at a university in the U.S.” Her plan was never to stay there, though. “I went back thinking I was going to leave again in two years when I was doing my degree, but I somehow got talked into doing another degree, a PhD… not even in the specific area that I wanted to. I had not lived there for a long time,” says Votta, as she recalls watching George W. Bush on television from Canada. “A lot had changed, and I thought, ‘Why did I come back here?’”

Votta talks about the precarious nature of living in the United States, and the lack of social support and healthcare. “If you’re screwed, you’re screwed,” she says. “Coupled with this super right wing, really hateful rhetoric, where I started to feel completely freaked out.” She recounts her time in Salem as the place that’s had the least effect on her music. “It was really different then, a lot quieter,” she says of her first stint there, before it became “a tourist destination glamourising death.”

“I don’t think people realise how much it’s just a place,” says Votta. “Let’s be frank, a bunch of people were murdered there, and that’s supposed to make it special? I don’t want to celebrate that. To me, I’m looking at something that was caused by what was historically a super misogynistic project. Men died in Salem, too, horrifically, and that wasn’t okay, either. More specifically, it was a lot of women getting murdered by the church in areas around Salem. Outcast women, solitary women, women who knew about medical stuff, but they weren’t supposed to, because they were women. I can’t really say, ‘Yeah, that’s cool, let me do something that celebrates it.’ It makes me really mad.”

It was this fury that helped shape the latest chapter in the Deep Fade story, Oblivion Spell, the majority of which was recorded in Liverpool over the summer of 2024 and released in April via Phage Tapes.  

“Deep Fade came from more of a place where I was really angry about a lot of things,” she explains. “Doing all this field work and feeling like there’s still this cage that you’re being put in. Being dismissed and not being taken seriously, not just in medical complaints, but the amount of people who are wanting to make sure that I knew what I was doing… because I’m not a man, I can’t possibly have any intelligence or motivation or anything!” explains Votta.

Recounting her experiences in work, music and academia, it illuminates the fact that historical behavioural patterns in society are so deeply ingrained that it’s hard to imagine them ever changing. “You have to work twice as hard to demonstrate that you’re competent,” says Votta. “My research is all about women with chronic illnesses, and all of them are telling me these doctors telling them they’re hysterical, there’s nothing wrong with you, not even doing tests or even checking out their complaints… just saying, ‘You’re fine’. It’s taking them 10 years for somebody to take them seriously and to give a shit about what they’re saying. Meanwhile, they’re literally suffering constantly. How is that okay?”

Votta’s anger is framed perfectly on Oblivion Spell. Screaming hell from the void in a what is abstract, radical dissonance. Like ligaments tearing away from bone, and as Votta once again surges into new dark territory, it’s a place only few occupy, as women within the sphere of esoteric metal continue to be grossly underrepresented.

“This is 2025, and we have this idea that feminism happened and we have equality? No, we don’t. I’m a musician making music in genres that are 99. 9 percent men?” says Votta highlighting the few exceptions, including Annmari Thim Hermansson from Arcana, who now makes music as Angelic Foe. “We exist and we can do these things, and I can do this,” says Votta, who gives other examples away from music. “I am the first woman in my family who could have a credit card and who didn’t have to have a man cosign a house, an apartment, a car… who could make their own choices and do their own things. Again, going back to this idea that there’s some kind of equality, there’s not.”

Votta then talks about the music she wants to make. “I don’t doubt that there are hundreds of other women who would make music they wanted to if they felt comfortable doing it. I just got mad and was like, ‘It doesn’t sound like girl music? Good. I hope it doesn’t. I’m going to do it anyway, and I’m going to keep doing it because I know how, and nobody can tell me I’m not allowed to!’”

Sonically, Votta explains that Oblivion Spell was born out of experiment. “All along, I felt like I wasn’t allowed to, although I didn’t think of it in those terms until later when I was really thinking about it,” she says. “It was always there subconsciously that I wanted to make Oblivion Spell. I could have been doing that all along. I don’t give a shit if it’s all men making stuff like that. I’m gonna do it anyway! But instead, I was really intimidated by that.”

Even working alongside Aayd and Malkin, over the years Votta has always had the final call. “If I didn’t want something they did, it just didn’t happen,” she says, with Oblivion Spell being the first Deep Fade release where Votta goes it alone. “It was my baby. That’s all me, exactly what you’re hearing is nobody else.” This also applies to the video for the album’s eponymous track.

“There was a part of me that was like, ‘Should I put myself in videos for these songs. Is there something wrong with that?’ questions Votta. “I swear to God, the only reason you think you’re not supposed to do something is because there’s this constructed man in your head. It’s ridiculous the level to which I was rationalising it to myself, like, is it professional?’ says Votta, shaking her head, speaking how the video directly relates to her work with women who have chronic illnesses. “Women whose bodies exist and are almost separate from themselves,” she says. “It hurts. You feel bad. It’s not you.”

Sonically cleansing and thematically as deep into the vortex as she’s ever travelled, it’s why Votta sees Oblivion Spell as her watershed moment as an artist. “10 years from now, it’ll be special to me. Now that I know I can do it, I’m going to do it again. I’m so happy that I have this set of songs now, because not only did I do it, but I also didn’t let all the doubt host me.”

Liverpool has also been influential to Votta’s current creative spurt, as she admits to making a lot of music since moving to the city. “There’s something about it that reminds me of other places I’ve lived,” she offers. “It reminds me of Detroit… you can look around and see that it’s had hard times. You can see that there’s new signs of life happening, but there’s a lot of history. I love that I can leave my window open here, and people are yelling at four in the morning coming back from God knows where, arguing about your commitment to the band, you know?” laughs Votta. “I fucking love that, and it’s happened more than once.”

The latest result of Votta’s purple patch comes via her collaboration alongside Texas-based artist, Roy K Felps (Korperschwache) as I Am Providence who released their debut, The Voice of Death in October (again via Cruel Nature Records).

“Roy and I have known each other for a very long time. I think we both, for our various reasons, have been very upset and angry by the political climate of the U.S.,” says Votta. “Whether it’s women, LGBTQ, disabled, leftist, whatever, one or the other or both of us fit into a lot of these categories,” she says, speaking of her and Felps’ friendship which began years ago on Live Journal. “We’ve been talking about doing something together for a long time. It kind of became something we can do with the anxieties we have, but also like… we do exist, and we’re gonna do this, and we’re gonna tell you to fuck off while we’re doing it!” she smiles.

2026 is also shaping up to be another flagship year for Votta, with another release from The Spectral Light in the offing, which she and Aayd began recording shortly after the release of 10000 Stars. “Most of the music was recorded before Deep Fade began,” says Votta.

“We’ve got two other different projects that we’re working on. One is less harsh than Deep Fade. It started almost as us making jokes about guys in black hoodies,” she laughs, describing it as “sad disco, negative clubbing,” which sounds about as unique as her current projects. “There’s another one that’s a lot of just using vocals and then processing those to make a bed for a song with vocals on top of that,” she adds. “That’s another thing that’s still very nascent. It’s like making clubbing sad disco a little more fully realised.”

As the wheels keep turning in Amanda Votta’s world, through her resolve, it’s a creative lawlessness that makes for the most gloriously unhinged kind of art. “Whether everybody else gets what you’re saying or not, it doesn’t even matter,” says Votta. “You’re trying to do something that is specific, so you have to do that.”

Oblivion Spell is out now via Phage Tapes. Purchase from Bandcamp.

Obliteration and The Voice of Death are out now via Cruel Nature Records. Purchase from Bandcamp here and here.