DESCRIPTION:
Album: The Entire City

BIO

In Bourbon and Regency times, masked balls were a milieu of liberation, allowing people to shed their own inhibitions the strictures of society, and inhabit different personae for a night. In the 21st century, the same can apply in pop.


Fittingly, biographical details about Gazelle Twin -- a shadowy entity who creates unsettlingly beautiful, hypnotically haunting musical Art with a capital 'A' - are scant. The Gazelle Twin is -- or, perhaps more accurately, is not -- Elizabeth Walling. As a child she was "a bit sensitive, anxious, maybe a bit too reflective". And for now, that is already quite enough.


Gazelle Twin is a refreshingly discreet, secretive animal in a world where new female starlets no sooner fall off the conveyor belt than clamour to reveal everything about their tedious private lives, even their physiques, in song and interview, photograph and film. "I hate the way," Walling explains, "that most female artists face a minimum requirement to appear sexually available... not that sex is wrong, but there's so much more to a person isn't there?"


From the start, Elizabeth Walling has utilised the anonymity provided by costumes, masquerade-like, to assist in her performance. "The original reason," she acknowledges, "is that I'm quite shy and, with my face on show, I'd be inclined to be meek and apologetic." Nevertheless, Walling does not hide herself in masks and headdresses merely to present an 'alter ego' or 'dark side of the self' or anything so banal. Rather than an exercise in vulgar emotional exhibitionism, Gazelle Twin constitutes, says Walling, "a retreat inwards", crossing boundaries of identity and gender, even genus.


Of her spectacular stage costumes, she says "They are different disguises through which I'm trying to render my femininity, masculinity, or just my species either absent or warped." Her first attempt involved a feathery, tentacled suit inspired by Loplop, the recurring quasi-avian figure which appears in the art of Surrealist painter Max Ernst. "It's not really a bird," explains Walling, "more like a cross between an octopus, a spectre and some sort of pagan or regal costume from Elizabethan England". It was, she admits, "a bit ropey, I ended up looking like Zoidberg", but this shapeshifter is already moving on to other things.


To date, the Gazelle Twin discography consists of only two items: the single "Changelings", released last year on Something Nothing records, and backed with an imaginatively lateral-thinking cover of "I Wonder U" by Prince, the Minneapolitan genius being an acknowledged obsession of Walling's (especially his strange backwards beats circa Purple Rain and Parade). The second is another single, "I Am Shell I Am Bone", due in April on Anti-Ghost Moon Ray Records, a new indie label (and blog) set up with fellow Brighton musicians.


Already, these recordings have earned acclaim everywhere from Time Out to The Guardian to Metro to Diva magazine, and drawn comparisons to Bjork, Elizabeth Fraser, Siouxsie, Lamb, Portishead, Goldfrapp, Kate Bush and Fever Ray. The last two are particularly pertinent: it was Bush who provided Walling with the blueprint for presenting 'classical' music in a pop context, and Karin Dreijer Andersson who, both in Fever Ray and The Knife, inspired her visual boldness.


Gazelle Twin's atmospheric, avant-garde sounds are often deeply cinematic -- one can imagine them scoring Lynch's Eraserhead or Lang's Metropolis -- and this is no coincidence. Between the crucially formative ages of 17 and 25 she never listened to pop, and became engrossed instead in studying choral and film music: "the gnarly, plinky-plonky stuff, unsettling but also euphoric". Brad Fiedel, the composer responsible for the mood music while Arnie Schwarzenegger kicked cyberpunk ass in the Terminator movies, is a particular favourite (and Walling indeed nearly pursued a career in film music).


....more @ http://gazelletwin.com/

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