Tag: Anti-Ghost Moon Ray (Page 1 of 4)

A Short Conversation with GAZELLE TWIN

1 October 2018 /


Following the success of her highly acclaimed ‘Unflesh’ album, Elizabeth Bernholz made her conceptual art as GAZELLE TWIN complete, with its continuation in ‘Out Of Body’ originally commissioned by the London Short Film Festival in 2015.

But the elusive artist saw a string of life changing events, one of them being her move “far out of the city”. Relocating to the good, old England countryside, would seem the right move to enjoy more pastoral matters, the joys of quaint, idyllic countryside, while residing amongst animals and flowers, knitting and making jam.

Of course GAZELLE TWIN would do none of the above. Instead she nitpicked on the absurdity of our existence, no matter where we are located. And her latest long player ‘Pastoral’ says it all, from the striking Deutsche Grammophon referencing artwork co-conceived with Jonathan Barnbrook and beyond.

Elizabeth Bernholz chatted about her “deranged, absurd reflection of deranged and absurd times” in deepest Old England.

The four years since ‘Unflesh’ was a rather busy period for you…

Yes it was, much of that time was spent touring the ‘Unflesh’ album worldwide and working on new or offshoot projects in between. It was a fantastic two years of adventure and fun, and then I fell pregnant towards the end of 2015 with the plan to take break to write for a couple years.

If ‘Unflesh’ shocked, ‘Out Of Body’ only cemented the feeling, aren’t you worried some will simply not get you?

No. Being understood has never been a concern of mine, least of all with what I create.

You like a bit of dystopia, as shown in ‘Kingdom Come’?

A brief look into the history of art, literature, or film shows us that fictional projections of dystopia often prove to be like prophecies. Ballard was known as “the seer of Shepperton” for just that reason. I wouldn’t say I like dystopian ideas, but that I feel that there is great truth in them.


So there was the big move out of Brighton? Why was this purely for domestic reasons or had there been artistic motivations too?

The decision was purely financial, if we didn’t move out of Brighton, we would not be able to tour ‘Unflesh’ around America, Canada or elsewhere and still keep our day jobs going or our rent paid. It was that simple!

And it was an opportunity that we did not feel we had much to lose on, as we thought we could easily move back to Brighton should we wish to. Ha! No chance now.

And in the depths of the idyllic countryside, are you still “hypersensitive to everything around (you) all the time”?

Yep. It’s just the person I am. It’s useful for a creative sensibility, as I don’t need to look very far for inspiration. I can literally find it anywhere! It’s all about being able to tune in (or out).

How are you observing the state of the country post-Brexit and the shenanigans in the US of A?

People are still people, they flock together with others they feel safe to be neighbours with, and those boundaries get more and more protected when people feel afraid or threatened by something. That is happening on a mass scale right across USA and Europe, and it is alarming to see the way that people are responding, but I don’t think it’s anything new.


And the red and white 21st century jester outfit just sums it all up…

The idea is that the Jester is the base figure upon which there are layers of traditional clichés and modern clichés applied. It’s no singular thing. The Jester adopts different characters, it caricatures, it imitates and mocks and mongers fear… that is how I see the red imp. It’s a multi-puppet.

The football mascot twist adds an extra sinister quality, is this a statement on mob mentality?

Not specifically no, but of course there is a lot of meaning behind those aspects and they are there to make a point – my focus here is on contemporary clichés, and the demographics that are pandered to but also scapegoated by the tabloid press, depending on their agenda.

‘Better In My Day’ and ‘Little Lambs’ are just fierce, even more aggressive than anything that was on ‘Unflesh’?

I very much wanted there to be a sense of mania and relentless energy running through the album. I think it’s important to have that rhythmical hook for live performance, but also to be able to work up a frenzy. It’s all part of the mood I’m trying to create and get myself and the audience completely immersed in.

‘Glory’ comes over like creepy GOLDFRAPP, how did that shape up in the studio?

I would say that the musical influences prevalent in ‘Glory’ are pretty far away from GOLDFRAPP to be honest, they are not a band I really have ever listened to at all. What I had in mind on this particular song was something closer to Scott Walker or even Bowie on ‘Low’. I wanted to harness a kind of towering, God-like voice. The barebones of the track was actually an unused demo for ‘Unflesh’. I think I started with a bassline and built from there, I hadn’t really planned on making a song in that style, for this album at all. I felt very far away from melodic drama at that point but the song just sort of grew into itself and worked as the centrepoint of the record.

You continue with the heavy vocal processing on ‘Pastoral’, what decides the tone of voice for each track and what effects to use?

Vocals often come last in the production chain, so it usually depends on the theme and the mood of the song and what I feel it needs texturally or rhythmically… whatever I can bring to it through vocal technique and / or manipulation I do as much or as little as needed.

You continued the experimentation with the musical side of things, from medieval instrumentation to rave culture… how did you come to experience these two very different forms originally?

Early music seems to have always been a part of my musical education and palette, but I think this is probably the first project where I felt it was truly relevant to the themes I was working within. The rave culture, or more specifically – house and techno influence really came from being a younger sibling to a brother and two teenaged sisters growing up in the 1990s when illegal raves were happening all over the countryside near where we lived. My experience of that was secondhand, but nevertheless quite memorable. The music frightened me, because it was all very alien at the time.


How will the upcoming ‘Pastoral’ live presentation differ from ‘Unflesh’ and ‘Kingdom Come’?

In terms of production value, the ‘Pastoral’ tour is not so different from the ‘Unflesh’ set-up. It is simple and direct, noisy and strange. But there’s more smiling 🙂

What are your hopes and expectations for ‘Pastoral’?

Well I am already pretty blown away by the response to the album.

I never expected to sell out of vinyl and CDs within the first week of release but just that has happened, and I am stunned and exceptionally happy.

The last four years has been a really long and rocky journey full of dramatic life changes, and there have been plenty of times where I felt I may never return to touring, or get the opportunity to release music in the way I was able to in 2014. I am pleased I have been able to do all the things I set out to do with this concept and that it has already been so well received.

I hope that there will be a great run of live shows worldwide this coming year and beyond and that I can hopefully open up some more opportunities for making new projects.

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its grateful thanks to Elizabeth Bernholz

Additional thanks to Zoe Miller at Zopf PR

‘Pastoral’ is released by Anti-Ghost Moon Ray as a red vinyl LP, CD and digital download available from https://gazelletwin.tstor.es

GAZELLE TWIN 2018 live dates include:

Warsaw New Theatre (3rd October – ‘Kingdom Come’ performance), Manchester Soup Kitchen (5th October), Brighton Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (11th October), London Somerset House Lancaster Rooms (16th November)

http://www.gazelletwin.com/

https://www.facebook.com/gazelletwin

https://twitter.com/gazelletwin

https://www.instagram.com/gazelletwin/

https://gazelletwin.bandcamp.com/

http://www.antighostmoonray.com

Text and Interview by Monika Izabela Trigwell and Chi Ming Lai
1st October 2018, updated 18th October 2018

GAZELLE TWIN Pastoral

18 September 2018 /

As innocent and idyllic as the new album title from GAZELLE TWIN sounds, those who are well familiar with Elizabeth Bernholz’s previous output, won’t be fooled.

The queen of all things weird and wonderful is back after the highly acclaimed ‘Unflesh’. ‘Pastoral’ should be glorifying her new found life in the depths of Old England, a move amidst other life changing events; instead, it “exhumes England’s rotten past, and shines a torch over its ever-darkening present”.

No matter what century we live in, the evil, greed and consumption have gone full circle, no matter “What species is this? What century? What atmosphere? What government?”, as questioned with choral voices in the opening ‘Folly’, with the intro like DEPECHE MODE’s ‘The Great Outdoors’ played backwards.

If things were indeed ‘Better In My Day’, which is proposed in a house / rave notion with the additional twists from frenzied electronics, then “the world with jobs, no foreigners, no locked doors and kids full of respect” was “much better in my day”.

The tribal sounds of what promised to be lovely and cuddly in ‘Little Lambs’ is nothing of the kind. Almost ritualistic, the mantric rhythm sounds scary, and the “little lambs” are us: the little island dwellers, fed lies and distractions to keep us away from the bigger picture. “Save yourselves” the synthesised voice warns, before ‘Old Thorn’ ushers the “multi-gender voices, in vernaculars old and new” as if.

‘Dieu Et Mon Droit’, sung with a KATE BUSH poise, crown the otherwise sad state of affairs described here. Bernholz’s vocal goes male on ‘Throne’ in monophonic rhythm, spitting out words with disgust: “Scratching, Picking, The wound, Bleeds, Pus, Flows, Sticks, Stinks”. ‘Mongrel’ describes a new breed of humans and the new behaviours which are ridden with self-assurance, opinionated yet easily offended over nothing, but it suits them. The opening questions from ‘Folly’ return, “What species is this? What century?”

The glorious Old England won’t come back as in ‘Glory’, delivered in the style of ZOLA JESUS goes mediaeval. The Wiccan imaginary beaten out of the drum ritual sees new found sounds and experiences Eastern influences in the plethora of styles, each as distant from each other, as they are close.

The meeting in the good Old English ‘Tea Rooms’ won’t bring the illusion of “pastoral picture”; the reality is far uglier than the idyllically drawn “hedgerows and steeples” or “cattle, tearooms”, because there’s also the “roadkill” and the village square sees executions as well as happy country summer fetes. ‘Jerusalem’ mocks the “ideal citizen”, with the sneer from the riddler, while ‘Dance Of Peddlers’ utilises early instrumentation in the form of recorders intertwined with courtly jester music, spitting out the truth at once: “It’s the Middle Ages, But with lesser wages”.

The first single from ‘Pastoral’, ‘Hobby Horse’ is as deranged and as mysterious as any work of GAZELLE TWIN, but this time she spells it out: “Pack on the loose but I can’t let them in here, My fears are growing, My wounds are showing, My time is up I want to get the f*ck out of here NOW”. She mocks ‘Ye Olde’ and ‘The Everyman’ of the English cliché, brandishing a sneer and a hobby horse.

Certainly not the ‘Sunny Stories’ expected by the title, it’s “All your history’s happened now”, mystically performed with a compelling, eerie vocal, whistling in the country winds and reverberating in the darker skies, with no stars present. Darkness, just darkness out there…

Maybe a better life lies ‘Over The Hills’, a happy country song delivered while riding and we are back to the “good old days”, where “King George commands and we obey”, and there are still “Flanders, Portugal and Spain”, even if they’re getting further and further.

Elizabeth Bernholz hasn’t disappointed in the “deranged, absurd reflection of deranged and absurd times”. Her village square isn’t a source of empty joys, her country cottage isn’t the perfect, magical place and her Old English neighbours aren’t the friendly country folk, ready to help in need.

No, there is horror in every idyll, and danger lurking beyond the ‘quaint’ and she’s not fooled. She will sit there in her red 21st century jester outfit on and make you laugh! I’m sorry, did I say laugh!? No, she’ll make you reflect and cry over the state of affairs, but only if you choose to see it.

‘Pastoral’ is released on 21st September 2018 by Anti-Ghost Moon Ray as a red vinyl LP, CD and download available from https://gazelletwin.tstor.es

GAZELLE TWIN 2018 live dates include:

Gent Vooruit (20th September), Station Narva Festival (22nd September), Warsaw New Theatre (3rd October – ‘Kingdom Come’ performance), Manchester Soup Kitchen (5th October), Brighton Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (11th October), London Somerset House Lancaster Rooms (16th November)

http://www.gazelletwin.com/

https://www.facebook.com/gazelletwin

https://twitter.com/gazelletwin

https://www.instagram.com/gazelletwin/

http://www.antighostmoonray.com

Text by Monika Izabela Trigwell
18th September 2018

NEAR FUTURE Ideal Home

15 May 2018 /

Neil Arthur and Jez Bernholz are NEAR FUTURE, a project featuring the BLANCMANGE front man and the Brighton based artist who also co-founded the Anti Ghost Moon Ray art collective that spawned GAZELLE TWIN , ROSEMARY LOVES A BLACKBERRY and ANNEKA.

Their debut album ‘Ideal Home’ has been several years in the making, constructed through the modern medium of remote collaboration, although the pair have shared a stage on numerous occasions, notably on BLANCMANGE’s Semi Detached’ tour.

With both Arthur and Bernholz being vocalists as well as musicians, the pair experiment with voice-derived textures in NEAR FUTURE perhaps more than with their other work. Opening with the delightfully sombre ‘Ideal Home’ title track, it is a fractured number which takes a detached dual vocal into Eno-produced TALKING HEADS territory with a gently tribal rhythmic feel and asks “should I be full of regret?”

Meanwhile, ‘Field This’ is centred around a hypnotic bass mantra and a bleeping backbone surrounded by an impressionistic fourth world choir, as Arthur points to a period “pre-Madonna” while surreal lyrics recall “I remember when you were freshly peeled” before asking to “try semaphore”.

‘Overwhelmed’ captures shrill strings cocooned in an aural cavern with a claustrophobic Neil Arthur lead vocal that while recognisable, is quite different from anything by BLANCMANGE. The appropriately titled ‘Thought Terminating In Your Night’ sees Arthur’s voice raw and exposed before an eerie metronomic backdrop builds around him. The instrumental ‘Come And Play’ adopts a quite menacing atmosphere of synthetic chorals.

Based around a repetitive synth line, the spoken word art piece ‘Dawn’ features a skewed Bernholz reciting images of “coffee headaches” over sustained guitar sweeps and a building percussive rumble alongside uneasy thoughts of “teeth that felt like glassware”. But there’s the most amazing and chilling lead shimmer on ‘Gap In The Curtain’; driven by a primitive drum box, it comes over slightly like a contemplative OMD reimagining ‘Sad Day’… yes “you couldn’t make it up”.

Another spoken-word piece ‘Kites Over Waitrose’ is almost poetry over electronic backing with some exotic acoustic sounding Oriental textures where Arthur talks of the “scattering masses”, before closing with the sub-drone drama of ‘Bulk Erase’. Laced with a melancholic droll where “so much needs fixing but so little time”, Arthur takes the Eno-esque atmosphere into his own green world for “one thing at a time”, with the closing synthesized heartbeat echoing ULTRAVOX’s ‘Just For A Moment’.

‘Ideal Home’ is a fine debut record from NEAR FUTURE, and it’s one that sits well next to Neil Arthur’s BLANCMANGE and FADER as well as Jez Bernholz’s own brand of eccentric pop. It’s an extremely prolific period for Neil Arthur and with another BLANCMANGE album ‘Wanderlust’ on the way in the Autumn, there will be even more escapist expressionism to come.

‘Ideal Home’ is released by Blanc Check Records on 25th May 2018, available in vinyl LP and CD formats, pre-order from https://nearfuture.tmstor.es

A NEAR FUTURE live show plus Q & A with Neil Arthur and Jez Bernholz takes place at The Institute of Light, 10 Helmsley Place, London E8 3SB on Thursday 6th September 2018

https://www.facebook.com/futureisnear/

https://twitter.com/_nearfuture

Text by Chi Ming Lai
15th May 2018, updated 20th May 2018

NEAR FUTURE Interview

28 April 2018 /

Photo by James Styler

Swelling in sonic density, NEAR FUTURE’s ten-track debut album ‘Ideal Home’ is an enjoyable experimental collection of songs and soundscapes.

From the art pop of the album’s title track and the serene ‘Gap In The Curtain’, to spoken word set pieces like ‘Dawn’, all blended in with assorted field recordings and neo-instrumentals, the album showcases the music combination of Neil Arthur and Jez Bernholz.

Arthur is best known as the front man of BLANCMANGE, while Bernholz will be remembered by some as the opening act on 2015’s ‘Semi Detached’ tour, having issued his first long player ‘How Things Are Made’ the year via the Anti Ghost Moon Ray art collective he co-founded with GAZELLE TWIN.

Having been involved in five albums since 2015, Neil Arthur is probably at the most prolific stage of his career. As well as juggling BLANCMANGE, there has also been FADER with Benge, resulting in the ‘Ideal Home’ album being several years in the making.

NEAR FUTURE kindly took time out to chat about their first full length fruit of labour and described how their partnership has allowed each of them to think outside of their regular artistic boxes to produce a quite unusual but accessible body of work.

Photo by GMB18

How would you each describe NEAR FUTURE compared with other projects you’ve been involved in?

Neil: Freeform. Good to share the work load. Half the pain, twice the gain!

Jez: Definitely. It’s been freeing as well, from a songwriting perspective. A lot less pressure than I put on myself as a solo artist.

You’ve shared live bills together but how was the bones of this album constructed? Has it been a lot of remote work?

Jez: I felt that it evolved from the email exchanges and anything goes approach, to when we prepared for our first live performance at Sensoria. Those rehearsals cemented everything for me, it gave the songs more structure and coherence.

Neil: Mainly by remote, with other parts on our meetings. The Sensoria cementing experience, followed by a trip to the home of gravity.

Being musicians of different generations, where did you find your common ground in influences and motivations?

Neil: No boundaries, anything goes. Discussions on lack of sleep and emergency repairs. Mundane everyday tasks, often became the detail of our focus I think.

Jez: The lyrics for me, ending the poetry in the everyday. We exchanged music by others and I discovered something new. I felt that subliminally we were both thinking of Michelson, NEU! and HARMONIA, but we never explicitly talked of other artists, it seemed to just gel naturally. Maybe I shouldn’t think too hard for fear of breaking the magic!

Photo by Richard Price

With you both being vocalists as well as musicians, how did you decide who would sing lead on particular tracks?

Neil: I think we only once discussed who would do the vocals on one song, ‘Dawn’.

We’d send ideas to each other, eventually it’d be time for a voice and somehow one appeared. A bit like choosing another synth sound really, oh yes, except there’s the words too.

Jez: My own view originally was that whoever wrote the music, the other person would eventually add a vocal to it. It didn’t quite end up that way but it definitely started in that way. I actually remember the track ‘Ideal Home’ coming more musically from Neil as a starting point and I finished it with the lyrics and vocals. ‘Overwhelmed’ came more from an inspired Neil vocal in response to some music that I had written. But in the end, it was just going instinctively with what felt right and trying out different things.

As a result of that, there appears to be a lot more experimentation in NEAR FUTURE with vocal texturing and processing?

Jez: Without any pressures with this project, I was definitely a chance to take that process further. I enjoyed the idea of Neil’s voice being so familiar to so many people and perhaps producing it in a way that would be totally unexpected, like on the track ’Thought Terminating’ where, as Neil says, it definitely fits with the music and the lyrics.

Neil: It seemed to fit not only the music and field recordings, but also the lyrics on some tracks.

The album’s title track ‘Ideal Home’ was also the first single, what do you remember of its genesis?

Neil: Jez started this idea off and wrote the lyrics. I chopped stuff up and moved the arrangement around a bit to fit the sounds added. Oh hold on… scrap that, it must have been another song. I’ll have to look through my hard drive, to find the origins of this. No doubt the title would have been changed knowing me.

Jez: I remember it completely the other way around! This was the first project that we did together and Neil had the basis track written and I did chop it up a lot and added the vocals and lyrics. Neil responded by adding his vocal and some other synth parts.

Neil: I found it. Of course, Jez is correct, I started it off and it was called ‘Pallet’ and stuck in my BLANCMANGE hard drive.

Photo by Richard Price

There’s a tribal rhythmic feel on a number of tracks?

Neil: As Jez mentions, it just felt right. Sometimes as you listen through to the song or parts that make up the track, you start to hear other stuff, that isn’t physically recorded, but is suggested by the interplay of what has been printed.

Jez: I think it just felt right, particularly on ‘Dawn’, like an angry pagan army coming over the hills with the sunrise behind them, some kind of reckoning; it somehow seemed appropriate.

You got a most amazing and chilling lead shimmer on ‘Gap In The Curtain’?

Jez: It’s a very, very heavily stacked combination of sounds from a PSS-170, about 40 different layered guitars, sax and a synth made from vocals and it just keeps building. Lots of reverb too. It really turned out nicely and it’s one of those elements that keeps the track unique to us, I don’t think it would be easily replicated.

‘Kites Over Waitrose’ is a great title and almost poetry over electronic backing, what inspired that?

Neil: Pincer movement panic buying! Jez sent some music over and we weren’t sure if it would be best left as an instrumental as I thought it worked without words. A while later, rifling through notes, I had these words and tried it out with the music, and our field recordings.

Jez: I love Neil’s lyrics for this. Again, I think he just captures the poetic mundanity of these otherwise forgettable moments. The title really does capture the duality of that.

Another spoken-word piece is ‘Dawn’…

Neil: I couldn’t sleep, so went to do some writing and heard this amazing early dawn chorus, that I recorded on the phone.

When I listened back to it, there in the background was this mechanical throbbing rhythm. I enhanced that with synths, then Jez took over and came back with these wonderful words. Last, we added the feedback sounds.

Jez: I’d had some words for a while which I could never really make fit without them sounding rushed.

When I saw Neil’s working title ‘Dawn’ for the music, it made me think about how my life had changed since the birth of my son, and I revisited those words with more clarity about what they meant, added more to them referring not only the past, but also the near future. The pace of the music gave me the impetus to speak slowly, and they worked nicely.

‘Field This’ has a quite mechanical backbone, is the “prima-donna” referring to anyone in particular and where is this “car park” that was?

Neil: Ha ha! Yes well, last thing first, the car park was in Leeds and first thing last, the story line is set in the time before Madonna. So it’s pre-Madonna. Not though, pre-Maradonna!

The neo-instrumental ‘Come & Play’ has a quite claustrophobic atmosphere?

Jez: It is definitely about that, like being allured to stay somewhere that’s maybe not quite right, there’s something sinister underneath it all.

Is NEAR FUTURE likely to hit the road alongside your other commitments?

Neil: No doubt.

Jez: ASAP.

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its grateful thanks to NEAR FUTURE

Special thanks to Steve Malins at Random PR

‘Ideal Home’ is released by Blanc Check Records on 25th May 2018, available in vinyl LP and CD formats, pre-order from https://nearfuture.tmstor.es

https://www.facebook.com/futureisnear/

https://twitter.com/_nearfuture

Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
28th April 2018

GAZELLE TWIN Kingdom Come

2 December 2017 /

Keeping her privacy well under wraps always seemed rather important for Elizabeth Bernholz aka GAZELLE TWIN.

The concept of portraying herself via her music, instead of physical looks surely speaks for itself. “This is me” she says, through the animated noises, quirky sound manipulations and captivating imaginary, both audio and visual. Not a stranger to artistic enterprises, such as her ‘Out Of Body’ project and its predecessor, ‘Unflesh’, Bernholz isn’t the one to dissect her musical directions, “explain or justify my work to anyone, least of all try persuade someone to persevere with it if they don’t already have the desire to do so”.

For those after easy listening pieces of electronica, GAZELLE TWIN is not at all suitable; one won’t find gentle, beautifully orchestrated musical gems, catchy hooks and the challenges of “what can this synth do for me” type. What you will find is: reflection, politically charged landscapes, metaphysical elements and the most unusual sounds, painting utopian visions of the world of today.

While ‘Out Of Body’ dealt with the beauty and ugliness of our mortality, with the intricacies of how our bodies work, the crude physicality of the shell versus the mind, ‘Kingdom Come’ looks at the devastation of modern societies and the very social diseases that eat away at nations and individuals.

Based on the eponymous book by JG Ballard, the father of dystopian modernism, who in music has influenced everyone from Gary Numan to Madonna, ‘Kingdom Come’ is a thoughtful representation of how the corporate greed and misplaced alliances alienate individualism and crash what’s truly important, all the while eliciting the tribal and primal behaviours from, otherwise docile human beings. Homosapiens are violent predators, lead to believe we have an alternative. If Ballard’s notions felt unpleasant, GAZELLE TWIN likes to “get under the skin of those ideas, because they are bizarre, and uncomfortable.”

The audio visual experience was first commissioned for Manchester’s Future Everything festival; ‘Kingdom Come for Two Vocalists’ saw the production from Bernholz performed by Natalie Sharp, also known as LONE TAXIDERMIST, and Stuart Warwick. Dressed in a mixture of sharp business suits and gym outfits, the pair run the rut of life on treadmills, getting nowhere. The life of work, controlled leisure activities, contrived fun and artificial happiness ooze from the performance, which has now been presented in an audio mini-album of seven tracks.

Opened by ‘See How They Run’ with its haunting aura of dread, it is followed by galling ‘Metro’ ,quoting the utopian truths such as “choices are compulsory”, uttered in frightfully distorted mantric voices are deeply disturbing. Next, the machine gunned out ‘The Suburbs’ continues the feelings of danger and inability to escape the reality, while the cinematic ‘I Consume Only’ emulates the voice of a Catholic father preaching the mass of never-ending greed , “I can suck you dry”.

‘Hallowed’ deafens with a paralysing sound of horns, suppressed female vocals and the occasional sigh of struggle, or is it sexual? It matters not, it’s all monitored by the state, right? We are all on the ‘Death Drive’; a fast paced road to nowhere, where’s the end of it? Death is the end of it. To summarise, ‘Cling Film’ covers it all, in a further rise of unnerving sound elements and frightening voices.

GAZELLE TWIN feels dystopia as a theme is here to stay for a while; after all it’s an indefinite source of inspiration, and the world events observed unfolding daily certainly can’t provide the alternative. And what’s the alternative? Socialism? Religious freedom or anarchy?

Elizabeth Bernholz’s conceptual approach to music has reached higher levels.

It is weird watching two vocalists on treadmills, uttering sometimes indescribable sounds, crying out mutilated words and twisting in agony of something incomprehensible may feel peculiar; but what an interesting approach to portray the wrongs in this world.

Terrifying? Yes.

Food for thought? Definitely.

‘Kingdom Come’ is released by Anti-Ghost Moon Ray as a digital download, available from https://gazelletwin.bandcamp.com/album/kingdom-come

http://www.gazelletwin.com/

https://www.facebook.com/gazelletwin

https://twitter.com/gazelletwin

http://www.antighostmoonray.com

Text by Monika Izabela Trigwell
2nd December 2016

« Older posts

© 2017 ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK | Email: theelectricityclub@googlemail.com
Privacy Policy

Up ↑