Ethereality

PHOTO COURTESY OF JELLE WAGENAAR.

For Dana Wachs, a veteran sound engineer who’s mixed and toured with the likes of Cat Power, St. Vincent, and MGMT, making her own music was, at first, a luxury, then a necessity. Using the alias Vorhees for her solo project, Wachs has assembled five dreamy songs on her debut EP, Black Horse Pike (Styles Upon Styles), out later this month. The songs were written over a period of several years, until, Wachs says, “I thought, ‘These definitely deserve an audience.’ ” And deserving they are—the songs are uncommonly beautiful, somewhat lonely, charged with thrumming guitar riffs and airy, ethereal vocals. “Writing starts out sonically, not melodically or lyrically,” she says. “I hear a texture or sonic signature in my head, and I try to re-create that.”