Photo credit: Christian Strehlow
Amanda Huff
It took Amanda Huff some time to retire Selfish Skin. Between her increasingly full schedule of performances at festivals and tribute shows (including this winter’s Björk tribute show, which she curated), her side work and her performances with the jazz project Strangelander, the versatile Milwaukee singer had periodically released tantalizing stray tracks online under the Selfish Skin moniker. And she considered releasing her solo debut, Hemiptera, under that moniker, too, despite the protestations of her primary collaborator for the project, electronic producer Christian Strehlow.
“I had to convince her that Amanda Huff is just an extremely charming name for a singer,” Strehlow says. She eventually agreed it was the way to go.
“I think it just made more sense to go forth as Amanda Huff and drop Selfish Skin, which is something I was trying to make work for too long,” Huff says. “I think I was always conceptually attracted to the idea of Selfish Skin and the persona, but this feels much more direct to me. It’s like shedding a layer. I can claim these sounds as my own.”
A modernist take on trip-hop that occasionally adorns its rich, electronic swells with torchy pianos, flashes of Latin rhythms and touches of flamenco guitars, Hemiptera isn’t the kind of record that Huff pictured releasing as her debut. It was born of impulse. Once the two musicians began collaborating on tracks, they accumulated them so fast that they were almost half done with the record before they even realized they were making one. Some of the songs were released online almost as soon as they were finished—a departure from what Huff describes as her usual process of “laboring over a song for six or seven years then putting it out once I’m sick of it.”
“I always imagined that if an album had come out under my own name it would have been something more stripped down, because it would have just been myself making it, but this is a lot closer to the sorts of sound that I’m into,” Huff says. “I’m usually very deliberate with how I work; I like to get down to the details and learn a song through and through, but this process was a little bit of the opposite. Not that it wasn’t careful or constructed, but I was working on a timeline and Christian was pushing me to relax a bit and work a little more intuitively.”
The process also involved writing songs around the barest thread of an idea. Usually, Strehlow would send her a track he was working on, Huff says, “and he’d have some stupid name tied to it; then I would take that name and use it as a writing prompt. It felt like a fun game. How do you twist whatever he’d named it into a song that reflected something deeper?”
That process led to some of the project’s most memorable numbers. “Cicada” conjures memories of long summer nights, while the festive, brassy “Caroline’s,” named for the sometimes-overlooked local jazz club, runs with the nightclub vibe of its namesake, prompting a performance from Huff that would make the late Shirley Horn proud.
Although some of these songs may become staples of Huff’s future live sets—Huff says she’s pitching a version of “Caroline’s” to her jazz band—it’s unlikely she and Strehlow will ever perform them together live. For one, Strehlow is in the process of leaving Milwaukee for California, a move he’s wanted to make for a while. But mostly, he says, the chemistry that the two have in the studio just doesn’t translate to the stage.
“It’s weird, because we did one live show together one time, and I have a feeling it’s the last live show we’ll do together,” Strehlow says. “It wasn’t anything bad, but I just felt so goofy. Basically, I stand in a corner and press play. I think for us to perform together it would have to come down to me building more of a live set, and that’s not really my thing. I’m more of a studio guy."
You can stream Hemiptera below.
