Several years in the making — the fruit of shared isolation, desert magic, and scattered lineages — Wildwife Wildlife is the debut collaborative full-length from spectral pianist / thought-form composer Nico Georis and Amo Amo, the musical project of performer and eudaemon Love Femme. Ten tracks of love and dub. Polyglossic dispatches from nowhere. It is, among many things, a party record; a meditation on mortality, death practices, and interdependence; and a tribute to the remote desert town where it was recorded.

Cheeky title aside (a play on the normie marriage bromide “happy wife, happy life”), Wildwife takes wildness as a serious proposition, something to be defended and (re)cultivated, wherever possible. Wildness as an antidote to the materially and spiritually deadening effects of living in the heart of empire. Recorded in a turn of the century dancehall, littered with curios and vintage gear (a dolphin skull shaker filled with sea urchin spines sits among Georis’s keyboards), the album captures, in Femme’s words, “the maniacal joy of being unpoliced.”

Femme comes by these themes honestly. Born in Chihuahua and raised (mostly) in El Paso, hers was a childhood spent “closer to the earth.” Daughter of rancheros, the middle sibling to ten brothers and sisters, she learned at a young age to ride horses, to shoot a gun. She is the descendant of psychics and revolutionaries, and spent her early twenties as a wayward member of New York’s esteemed experimental Living Theatre company.

Georis, who hails from California’s verdant and rugged central coast, has a no less illustrious pedigree. His father was a member of The Sandals, the band that scored Bruce Brown's iconic surf documentary, Endless Summer. His adolescence was marked by an early musical curiosity, producing songs on 4 track cassette recorders in his family basement of analog oddities. In subsequent decades (and prior to establishing his present desert home base), his facility on the keyboard instruments led him into underground music cultures in Paris, San Francisco and New York City. His is the insatiable appetite of a genuine musical renegade. Through a series of recent Leaving releases, Georis has developed a distinct post-classical idiom, a kind of Death Valley Kosmiche—a radiant and vast and formidable sound.

The two artists share more than a dogged work ethic and a reverence for the natural world, though share these things they do: their respective transnational and multilingual upbringings (Femme’s Mexico/Texas, Georis’s tiny Belgian-French enclave in California) instilled in each an itinerant spirit. Sensing one another to be kindred souls, the two decamped to the desert, each armed with a handful of orphaned songs.

Sung in French, Spanish, and English, these ten tracks haze and wobble, mirage-like, across the dance-floor. There are moments of unrepentant, nocturnal cool (“Ma Jolie Jola” and the Billie Jean–indebted “Le Glitch”), flanked by tracks like “Stars Inside” and “Amortality,” which evoke—lyrically and sonically—a vulnerable and courageous clarity re: Love as an underlying universal constant.

Both artists regard Wildwife as a sort of inflection point. For Femme, the album is Amo Amo’s first release as a solo project. Initially founded as a band circa 2017, the pandemic and various turns-of-fate have left her its sole remaining member, with all the attendant creative freedom. Georis, in turn, is foregrounding his strengths as a producer and songwriter, skillsets which, while not new to Georis (he has been writing “Song” songs in earnest since childhood, and producing for nearly as long), may feel new to listeners accustomed to the form and style of his piano pieces. As the record’s primary producer and player, he was motivated by a desire to showcase the spontaneity and dynamism of Femme’s vocal performance. And through years of close, collaborative songcraft with Femme, Georis found himself drawn back to the rock and pop structures that first ignited his love of music.

In recent months, Femme and Georis have taken up with the Indigenous Wild Horse Society. The group seeks to protect the centuries-old horse population of Mono Lake and Montgomery Pass from ongoing and violent federal extraction. These encounters with wildness, a wildness threatened, have greatly informed the record. And while Femme wishes to draw attention to the continuing work of the IWHS specifically, she more-so asks that listeners look around, find some wildness worth defending in their own lives, and show up in person. Love, grief, joy, activism, play, creation: these experiences are not, and need not be, mutually exclusive. This, also, is one of the record’s central concerns. To remix, slightly, the old Brecht line: Yes, there will be dancing in the dark times too. There will be dancing about the dark times.

All Songs Written, Recorded and Performed by Lovelle Femme and Nico Georis in Death Valley & Baja California.
Produced by Nico Georis.
Mixed with Shahzad Ismaily and Will "Spliff" Smith at Figure 8 Recording, Brooklyn.
Mastered by Jacob Winik & Amar Lal.
Words by Emmett Shoemaker

Cover Photograph by Dylan Howl.
Artwork & Design by Jordan Rundle.