Wulfsige is a music project exploring the boundaries of melodic ambient music. Their new album “Hallows” creates a cosmic flow of hypnotic twists and turns that make for a truly mind bending adventure.
I caught up with Wulf and Cleo from the band to talk about their early musical experiences, how their sound has developed and the making of the new album.
CMM-What was the first music that really made an impact on you all as kids and what artists or bands did you all enjoy the most?
Wulf:I had a wide range of musical interests growing up. Everything from the Hair soundtrack to Kiss, Billy Joel, Prince, and Joan Jett. My mother loved Heart and she would play Dreamboat Annie every night at bedtime.I’m a fan of a wide variety of music – bands like the Police, Depeche Mode, the Cure, New Order, the Pixies, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Ladytron, the Knife, the Sword, Queens of the Stone Age, Tune-Yards, and a bunch of other stuff. I think much of this music informs a lot of how I approach a song or project.
Clio: I grew up listening to my sister’s music. 70’s metal and hard rock, 80’s prog rock, a little bit of punk. I was pretty taken with Led Zeppelin, like the rest of the planet. It was Billy Joel that got me singing and Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics that drew me to pursue music. There were lots of other little side avenues, but those big seminal things really cratered into my consciousness first.
CMM-How did the band form and start developing your own sound?
Wulf: I have had a chance to be around some of the greats of video game music – Brad Derrick, Jason Hayes, Jeff Kurtenacker, and Justin Bell. Their music has always been a fundamental source of inspiration and was the reason I decided to start trying to get some of the music out of my head. I was working on learning orchestration and choral composition when I heard Old Sorcery’s Hand of Merlin soundtrack and discovered dungeon synth.It was inspirational – I started laying down some ideas and a ton of things came out. I put a lot of it together before stepping back and deciding to put a project together and put it out there. It was a year or so before I realized we had a kind of sound that was unique to us. Hans Zimmer said something like, ‘style or sound has something to do with the way a person approaches the keyboard.’ I mangled his words, but I think he was saying that how one lays their hands on the keyboard each time – their inclinations, natural gestures – all of it form to create a sound or style. I think about that a lot – it makes sense to me. Wulfsige has put out over 30 records and I’m still discovering our sound. I think when we start repeating ourselves though, that’s the end of the project for me.
Clio: Wulf was already working and composing all the time, making lots of music. He asked me to add some vocals here and there, I was intrigued. I didn’t have any familiarity with dungeon synth before, though it’s not so very different from other musics I have long history with and attachment to. I followed in the wake of his sound at first, trying to complement, and basically I still do. But I have an aesthetic that informs the things we work on together. Whatever our sound is, it’s developing in real time as we learn to fit our individual impulses together.
CMM-You recently released an album called “Hallows”. What was the writing and recording process like and were there any particular pieces of gear you used to get the sound you were looking for?
Wulf: Hallows was a weird one. I always get the itch to celebrate autumn and Halloween and this year was hearing a particular choral sound I wanted to try and capture. Hallows was going to be an EP with Exorcanto as the main track, but we were working on Dust at the same time and had a couple of tracks from that that we thought could be added to Hallows.
When we do orchestral arrangements, the work is entirely done in the box, played through a keyboard controller into Cubase. Gear-wise, it’s the classic home setup – a Macbook Pro, a synth (I have a Minifreak and a V-Synth), and an interface. We use the Motu2, an SSL, and a Focusrite. The Motu is the only one that I like though – the others sound weird to me. But that could be just me – I’m partially deaf to some frequencies.
We use Cubase and a lot of modeled synths, amps, and other VSTs. Most of our stuff uses Spitfire Symphony Orchestra, the Arturia CS-80, DX-7, Prophet, Juno, and Jupiter synths, but I also love the Buchla Easel and the Synthx. Decapitator, Valhalla effects, and many Newfangled products get a lot of use as well.
Amp-wise, we’re all about the Neural DSP plugin amps – Darkglass, Parallax, Nolly, and the Mesa Boogie amps get a lot of rotation. I think every release has at least one DSP amp on there – probably the Darkglass most of all. I run just about every synth through it to create funky sounds.
Guitar parts are a toss up of parts played through a Motu2 and parts played first through a keyboard and then arranged for a guitar vst. We record Clio’s vocals at a little studio we call Lemon. It’s a pretty primitive setup there – you can hear the neighbor’s dog barking here and there in some of our tracks.
CMM-If you could do a score for any film director, who would it be and what would the film be about?
Wulf: I’d love to do a soundtrack. I admire the work Reznor and Ross have been putting out. I think a good first film/director for us would be one not afraid to take a chance on weird arrangements. Most recently I’ve been particularly impressed by the Poor Things and both Smile soundtracks.
Clio: I’d like to think we could make an awesome Hitchcock soundtrack. Even better: Guillermo del Toro. It would be a Dickensian psychological horror piece.
CMM-Anything coming up?
Wulf: We’re always working on something. We have a few projects coming out over the holidays and a couple of others we’re forming up for early 2026. We’re working on a soundtrack for a game now and hope to do more of those.
Our style is shifting a bit for the next few records. Right now I’m interested in squashing and shredding the sound. The more ripped and torn it sounds, the better. It’s a phase, but I think it will produce some really cool stuff. We have one called Vision coming up that I’m fond of – but we’ll see how our style evolves over the coming year.
Clio: We have a lot of things coming out that should be very, very cool, including one that will feature more tracks like Cold Dead Eye’s Vespera, and the track off Prey called And Come To Dust.
