The extraterrestrial witchcraft of Revenge Wife

Revenge Wife’s Liz Nistico and the dream of horses; press photo courtesy of the artist.

In celebration of the debut album Alien Witch from HOLYCHILD’S Liz Nistico, the Manchester, New Hampshire artist presents:

3 current trends of Revenge Wife 

Albums in full

I’m an album girl, I love diving into the mind of an artist. But recently I realized, listening to an album is the best way to learn music. Because not only am I understanding an artist, but I’m getting their full lineage of artists that have inspired them, and even if I don’t know those artists their influence is passed onto me. Listening to an album is a divine moment of connecting to a musician, their long ancestors of musicians before them, and then me, the listener, adding my interpretation. Albums are art that evolve with time. Music is a time-based medium, playing with patterns, playing with time, pushing and pulling, making reality feel different. I want to get lost. I like to use art as a way to escape, it’s that balance between both escaping reality and looking at truth in a new way. I love albums that make me think, albums that wrap sound around me.

Disconnecting from your phone

Do it! I block social media from 7 pm to 10:30 am, every night. During that time, I’m free. Actually I also got rid of my phone number, so I’m even more disconnected. Years ago, when I was a child, my mom picked me up from somewhere, and spontaneously on our drive home, we took a detour. We decided to go shopping or somewhere fun, I can’t remember, but I had this small panic. No one would know where we were! This was a time before cellphones, so I never had a thought of that, just, we were off our routine…and it was so freeing. And I think of that moment and try to cultivate it everyday. The feeling that I am in charge of my time, and I am in a little bubble of space around me, and I do not have to answer to anyone. 

Horses

I grew up riding, but after my horse coach and my dance teach staged a dramatic intervention where I had to choose dance or horses (I was 14! I picked dance), well I hadn’t ridden for years. But now I’m back to riding every week and I love it so so so much. I go early to connect to the horses, to me that is the first step to being a strong rider: trusting your horse. Horses are so sweet  and playful. They teach me how to manipulate time. When I’m on a horse and we are cantering and somehow life slows down. I think everyone should spend some time around horses, because they’re so perceptive of us they are great mirrors. Being around a horse can show me how I am acting, how I am feeling. Plus they love snacks, who doesn’t?!

Revenge Wife’s Alien Witch is out now.

Revenge Wife’s Liz Nistico — voguing with a vengeance; photographed by Chris Wills.

Alien Witch walks into the zodiac halls of mirrors, rolling through the chord twisting corridors of “What if it *is* Me”, manifesting Greek deities of aquarian and equestrian persuasions on “Poseidon”. The spirit of the autumnal solstice on the brooding intensity can be found in the sludging, and slimy rhythmic chug of “Leave me to die”, before bringing the goth-dripped electroclash bounce of “Neighborhood Witch”, turning the beat machine up further on the coven club banger “Waste of Tears (Cry All Summer)”.

The big scene stealing passions push forward to the pastoral balladeering on the spirit shaking reflective recollections on “Only 17 (Libra)” as the mood becomes inflated with the high floating helium-huffed energy of “666 Bang Bang”. Further accelerating the attention to altering the electric edges of pop music constructs, “In the Flowers” spins you around and around the technicolor fields of floral pastels. Familial threads and the ties that both bind and divide are illustrated on “Sons and Daughters”, rolling with the recall of “Deja Vu” where time and place are sucked into that strange warp rift in the fabric of conventional reality where the future, present, and past collapses upon each other.

Liz orchestrates what feels like a pop opera arranged like a novella. Revenge Wife explores the bright light beacons of being in hand with the cosmic and cursed complications inherent within the intimate assemblage of actualization. The penultimate torch anthem “Inevitable Discomfort” brings the house down with the heart wrought confessionals that move the universe with a shake and break velocity. Alien Witch engages with a sensational world rocked by a state of ruin, and renewal, expressing the wanton abandon in lines like:

“…it feels like there's a part of me that wonders if giving up is just surrender undercover…”

The closing spoken prose that paints the messy portraits of “Bermuda Triangle” connects the traumnovelle all together. Merging Harlequin high drama with the existential affairs of spaced out sci-fi pulp, Liz Nistico articulates the disconnects in dreams, desires, and determination in the common era of insularity, instability, technocratic hegemony, and all the the symptomatic features of autocratic world orders.

Alien Witch is a performance ritual in the same spirit as Downtown Boys / Malportado Kids’ “Bruja Cosmica”. Revenge Wife conjures the cacophonies of the great ever after, today, and yesterday into celestial beams of light that connects the inhabitants of the outer reaches with the pagan mystics that tend to Mother Earth’s global gardens.