The Witch Ones? A band!
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Their music? Indie folk campfire meets earnest electronic anthems. Throw in sixties pop, nineties angst, and a deep belief in the interconnectedness of all energetic forces in the universe, and you have an idea of what these witches are offering up to the communal table. |
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It was late winter 2017 when Robert M. Johanson, Gavin Price and Kate Scelsa found themselves temporarily living in the energetic black hole that was downtown Washington, DC, on tour with a theatrical production of "The Sun Also Rises." Their longing for some beauty in the face of a country's existential despair resulted in afternoons spent collaborating on songwriting before their evening call time. Bleak days were transformed by an outpouring of creativity and a new kind of artistic union between the three of them. |
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The Witch Ones grew quickly from there. Kate, a lyricist with a fear of singing, brought on her wife Amanda Villalobos to embody the essential queer and feminine in the group's vocals. They added Mo Lioce on cello, Kristen Worrall on percussion, and John Gasper on bass, and soon the band was playing out in all of Brooklyn's classiest dive bars, whipping audiences into a frenzy of feelings.
The connections between these seven form an impossibly intricate map of the New York downtown experimental theater, music, and radio scenes. They are sound designers, stage managers, actors, composers, and puppeteers. The friendships are deep and the sensibility is communal.
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2019 brought gigs at WNYC's The Greene Space, The House of Yes, and weekends spent in upstate New York recording their first album and communing with the generative forces of nature. One late night swim augmented by natural supplements cemented the bond. Kate famously laughed so hard at the immensity of the night sky that she fell in the grass and peed her pants. |
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More gigs were to be played, more recording to be done, more communing to be had, all cut short by Covid isolation. A new way of working had to emerge. The three songwriters, desperate for community, met weekly on Zoom and created another album of songs together, demos circulating by email to the rest of the band, a concrete promise of some kind of a brighter future.
Four singles, one eponymous album later, and a couple of pandemic babies born to Kate and Amanda and Gavin and his wife Emily, and now the witches are coming together again for another deep dive into their well of tarot-cards-on-the-table lyrics combined with heart-on-sleeve harmonies.
2026 will bring the band's second album, looking back to that work started over Zoom in 2020 and toward the future of what it can mean to make music both together and apart.
The true witch believes in cycles, in a rejection of linear time. There is no beginning or end to our creative union. There is only the circle, the spiral, the forces of the Tower tearing down the old and the outdated, forcing us to build anew, inventing new systems for ourselves on our terms. The music must be the medicine.
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So mote it be. |