Artist Profile: Blackwater Holylight
Photo by Candice Lawler
Blackwater Holylight, the doom metal band formed in Portland, Oregon, has broken new ground with the release of their newest album Not Here Not Gone, commemorating their recent relocation to Los Angeles and crafting a culmination of the years they have spent together as a band with the intentional new sonic direction they have undertaken.
In many ways, the story of the band’s founder, Sunny Faris, serves to help frame the story of Blackwater Holylight as a whole.
While she didn’t grow up in a necessarily musical family, Faris was engaged with and interested in music from an early age. When she first encountered groups like Underoath and As I Lay Dying in early high school, this interest became even more ingrained in her creative spirit. This increasingly heavy taste, however, was tempered by her long-standing interest in folk and indie music, materializing through artists like Joanna Newsom and Minus the Bear.
She moved to Portland around the age of 18. Although she didn’t relocate with the sole intention of entering the music scene there, it seemed as though the creative act followed her wherever she went.
“It just felt like my whole life it's really what I've been supposed to do,” said Faris, “I'm a Pisces, and I've been interested in a lot of different things and a lot of different art forms and been curious about painting and sculpture and making jewelry and all this stuff. And music has kind of been the only thing that's been consistent through all of those years. It's really felt like the thing that I'm supposed to be doing.”
Relatively quickly upon her induction to the Portland scene, Faris got involved as a vocalist with a psychedelic-rock outfit. She also began touring with a folk band based in Denver near her hometown. These two ventures took her across the country and gave her invaluable experience in performing and exploring her own musical interests.
Yet when these two projects inevitably died out, she felt a creative void. She didn’t know what was next for her, and she even briefly considered ending her time as a musician.
Blackwater Holylight, however, emerged at the perfect moment. Faris had become intrigued by groups such as Weedeater and Monolord, and she had an inclination to experiment with a fuzzier, more distorted sound than the array she had long operated within. Blackwater Holylight was slowly formed as a result of this inclination.
Their first album, Blackwater Holylight, was originally meant to be an EP, but the label they were working with at the time suggested they turn it into an album. That project, along with their proceeding projects Veils of Winter and Silence/Motion, serve as time capsules of their early experimentations: a series of tracks that felt out the sonic space Blackwater Holylight hoped to occupy.
After so many years in Portland, however, the band felt it was time to move on to a different scene, both from a business and a personal perspective. They planned out their move to Los Angeles as a group with a stated intention: continue to grow and evolve as artists in a new environment.
“When we decided to move down here, it was me and Mikayla and Eliese. We all really agreed that Portland had offered everything that it could offer for us individually and as a band. The fact that we all decided to do this move together and to do it as a team has been so amazing… [We wanted to] just do the best that we can, to really lean into creative stuff and to be writing together.”
Their move came in the midst of their writing of Not Here Not Gone, and, in the project’s toned-down and intentional structure, it is representative of this transitory period in the lives of its creators.
From the rutted, distorted opening strums of “How Will You Feel”, to the sonic odyssey of “Heavy, Why?”, to the epic, seven-minute closing ballad “Poppyfields”, Not Here Not Gone simultaneously strips back some of the band’s earlier excesses while leaning even further into the combination of sweet melodics and jarring dissonance that has defined their sound since the beginning.
Yet Faris’s creative mission remains the same. Through all of her projects, and through the years that Blackwater Holylight has spanned, she simply hopes that her music will have the same effect that her favorite groups once had on her: relate to the listener in some way, wherever they’re at in life.
“Everyone can kind of take what they want from it. We made this record the way I do with all my art, which is just to hope that someone can make their own meaning in it and they can apply it to their life in a way that feels good for them personally… I just hope that people can hear it and it can touch them in a way that it's helpful for them to hear in the moment.”
