Gazelle Twin shares a new track ahead of the release of Black Dog

GAZELLE TWIN

SHARES NEW TRACK, A DOOR OPENS

NEW ALBUM, BLACK DOG, OUT 27 OCT

AN ALBUM ABOUT CONFRONTATION, CHILDHOOD FEARS AND HOW THEY MANIFEST IN ADULTHOOD

AUTUMN DATES – LONDON, NEWCASTLE, BRIGHTON

Composer, producer, singer, and visual artist Elizabeth Bernholz – aka Gazelle Twin – shares a new track on the eve of the release of her new studio, Black Dog, out on vinyl, CD and digitally via Invada Records on 27 October 2023.

Across Black Dog old stories are pillaged, digested, and regurgitated to write new ones, and on ‘A Door Opens’ she uses several piano samples, including a homemade sample of Schumann’s Ghost Variations, to create a new piece of work from a ghost version of a composition about ghosts.

Black Dog is an album about confronting fear – supernatural, collective, and personal – and tells a story that unfurls like a film. It addresses how our childhoods shaped our adulthoods: how any sense of trauma and grief is burnished onto a person’s memories forever, however much we try and escape it. Black Dog suggests how these feelings return in particular intensity when a person becomes a parent, as they watch themselves pass things on that they wish they hadn’t, wish they wouldn’t.

She explains, “I’m in the habit of facing my fears. So I spent years intimately recalling these childhood memories and rifling through old photos. I spoke to my family, and their various experiences of the house, and for some, the black dog in that bedroom. I spoke to friends, and friends of friends and heard their untold ghost stories, and listened obsessively to podcasts and documentaries on hauntings, possessions, and poltergeists.”

In some ways, Bernholz is purging herself on this album. Unlike her masked characters for previous releases, her face is recognisable and, she explains, she is “not as removed this time” from her persona. She is imagining herself as a medium for the voices inside herself, rather than looking out to displace them with other ideas. She emerges huge and godly as she does so, her voice moving from delicate tenderness to doom-driven power.

Black Dog looks back and looks in and looks back and looks in. We enter as we listen. We turn ourselves inside-out altogether.

I Disappear

Sweet Dream

Two Worlds

The Long Room

Unstoppable Force

This House

Author Of You

Walk Through Walls

GAZELLE TWIN LIVE
10 November – London, Bush Hall
16 November – Newcastle, Sage 2
24 November – Brighton, ACCA

24 February ’24 – Bristol Simple Things Festival

Gazelle Twin is the performance moniker for Elizabeth Bernholz, a composer, producer, singer, and visual artist based in the UK. In 2009 Bernholz created this “transformative” performance persona to encompass; composition, studio albums, soundtracks, art installations and live performance, intended to openly address a deep-rooted aversion to traditional and contemporary norms across the music industry, particularly for women. Her ever-changing, identity-warping personas based on powerful, emotional themes and a fiercely independent spirit has driven her output and many collaborations since.

Bernholz has independently released three critically acclaimed studio albums to date; The Entire City (2011), Unflesh (2014), and Pastoral (2018), together with three soundtrack LPs from album off-shoot performance projects; Out of Body (2015), Kingdom Come (2017), and Deep England with NYX Electronic Drone Choir (2021). As a newly established soundtrack composer, her credits for Film, TV, and Video games include: AMC’s The Walking Dead, The Virtues (C4), Cyberpunk 2077, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (Netflix), Nocturne (Amazon/Blumhouse), The Power (BFI/Shudder) and Then You Run (Kudos/Sky). Her collaborations as vocalist and producer include Gary Numan, Halsey (through Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross), Maxine Peake, Perc, Blanck Mass, DJ Dave Clarke and more.