Gazelle Twin: – Watch the video for Hobby Horse, taken from new album
GAZELLE TWIN – HOBBY HORSE
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE
NEW ALBUM, PASTORAL, OUT 21 SEP 2018
ON ANTI-GHOST MOON RAY
“Bound to shake your walls and rattle your windows” Max Reinhardt, BBC RADIO 3
“The first bit of evidence that Elizabeth Bernholz’s next album Pastoral – due out in September – could be her best to date”. THE QUIETUS
“Will likely be one of the year’s very best records.” CLASH
Gazelle Twin has released the video for Hobby Horse, the first single from her forthcoming album, Pastoral, out on Anti-Ghost Moon Ray on 21 September 2018.
The video, directed by long-time collaborator Chris Turner, firmly puts the album’s themes – exhuming England’s rotten past and showing its ever-darkening present – into focus. Watch it here.
Elizabeth Bernholz aka Gazelle Twin, explains, ‘Hobby Horse’ is yet another fun-but-deranged experiment in an ever-growing catalogue of collaborations with director Chris Turner. We have a mutual appreciation for the uncanny – especially the kind tinged with a bit of ultra-violence. It’s great working with someone who knows how to capitalise on every kind of “weird” there is, yet still managing to keep performance at the core.’
Gazelle Twin has announced a series of live performances, following the album’s live debut at Supersonic festival, that includes Rough Trade East on Thursday 27 September.
GAZELLE TWIN LIVE
20 Sep – Vooruit, Gent BE
22 Sep – Station Narva Festival, Narva EE
27 Sep – Rough Trade East instore, London UK – 7pm
3 Oct – New Theatre, Warsaw PL (Kingdom Come performance)
5 Oct – Soup Kitchen, Manchester UK
11 Oct – Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Brighton UK (double bill with GAIKA)
Told through a troupe of multi-gender voices, in vernaculars old and new; from the shrill echo of folksong to tabloid-tinged jaunts, the artist presents the notion that “there is horror in every idyll, and danger lurking beyond the “quaint” ”. The village square – once host to centuries of public torture – becomes a floral framed postcard, dolled-up for the Summer Fête. A sunny, afternoon walk over the hills unsettles a cloud of angry flies feeding from unidentifiable remains. Bigoted vitriol gently murmurs amidst tearoom chatter, as the neatly framed pastoral picture dissolves into a solemn ennui.
Forged in a rural idyll in Middle-England and four years in the making, amidst life-changing events, including a move far out of the city, Pastoral will be the first major release by the artist since her widely acclaimed LP UNFLESH (2014, Anti-Ghost Moon Ray) and is seamlessly on-theme, together with Bernholz’s J.G. Ballard-inspired A/V show ’Kingdom Come’ (soundtrack released November 2017, Anti-Ghost Moon Ray) – a fascism-infused hellscape, this time set in deepest Old England.
As its sole creator, Gazelle Twin “The Composer, Musician and Producer” has crafted an album overflowing with a frenzy of traditional and contemporary musical tropes; from early music instrumentation – the harpsichord and the humble recorder, fed through myriad electronics – to the compelling, ritualistic application of found sample-looping. Beyond Bernholz’s signature choral-infusions, here reverberating like a warped Sunday Service, there are even shades of ‘90s house and the once-thriving rural rave scene, albeit recalled as a watery, second-hand memory. In its consummation it is an album that feels pan-century, even pan-species.
Set against a verdant backdrop of hedgerows and steeples, Gazelle Twin “The Artist and Performer”, constructs an eccentric and commanding visual embodiment of all-of-the-above – a costume fit for a court Jester of the 21st Century. The colours of Neo-Nationalism. Coke cans, and DANGER. “It” (not “she”) hints at folkloric traditions with a footy mascot twist. The “Ye Olde” and “The Everyman” of the English cliché. Brandishing a sneer and a hobby horse. A riddle and a recorder. A jeer and a square dance in red, Adidas Gazelle’s, and a mad, fixed GRIN – first glimpsed in the single, ‘Hobby Horse’ (22 June, Anti-Ghost Moon Ray).
A deranged, absurd reflection of deranged and absurd times.
Hobby Horse / Deep England on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/3nhbyUgnNlTdQHfBuVVioD?si=xtmgFDnXSRK4agEgjMGYNQ
Pre-order the album: https://gazelletwin.bandcamp.com/album/pastoral
Pastoral is released on 21 September 2018, on Anti-Ghost Moon Ray (cat number AGMR035), and is gratefully supported through the PRS Foundation Momentum Fund.