GAZELLE TWIN ||| A BIOGRAPHY BY GARRY MULHOLLAND

What do Arnold Schwarzenegger, Prince, a shapeshifting creature called Loplop and an insane 16th century Italian composer who wrote madrigals about murdering his wife all have in common? They all, in some strange but crucial way, inhabit the unique world of Gazelle Twin.

Gazelle Twin is the nom de plume of Brighton singer, composer, performer and genius Elizabeth Walling. And the parts that the above notables play in the planet of sound and vision that she has constructed using little but a laptop and her imagination pay tribute to the range and scope of her ambitions. Getting bored of quirky, attention-grabby girls trying so desperately hard to be the kookiest new Bjork/Madonna/Siouxsie/Winehouse clone on the block? Good. Because Gazelle Twin’s debut album, The Entire City (release details tba), is what you’ve been waiting for.

Gazelle Twin’s music is dark, erotic, immersive, spooked and equally suffused with dread and adventure. Her fascination for early choral music (that would be the part that uxoricidal choral composer Carlo Gesualdo plays) provides the layers of Elizabethan harmonies that give the songs their ghostly wonder. Her love of classic sci-fi movie soundtracks, and especially the murky analogsynths and epic chords fashioned by Brad Fiedel for The Terminator (there’s Arnie!), informs the inky black texture of the Gazelle Twin sound. Elizabeth sets out to create beats that are as satisfying to experience as those found on Purple Rain and Parade (hence the Prince presence and her bravura cover of I Wonder U). And the album’s title and the extraordinary Gazelle Twin look is inspired by surrealist painter and sculptor Max Ernst, whose folklore-based changeling creature Loplop is re-interpreted by Elizabeth for her birdlike costume design. See? It all makes a sensual kind of (seventh) sense.

Elizabeth’s journey to the here and the now began with artist parents and an early fascination with music that led her to learn a variety of instruments to a level that enabled her to study music in Brighton. She became an accomplished classical composer, earning a number of ‘world premieres’. As Elizabeth explains wryly, ‘World Premiere is archaic muso-speak for a first performance which is designed to make even the most insignificant amateur performance sound good.’

Despite an Arts Council commission to soundtrack a documentary on anabandoned lunatic asylum, and taking part in a project to write classical music for the Cargo nightspot alongside the wonderful Micachu, Elizabeth found herself gradually losing faith in the more traditional contemporary classical events. 'They were usually in fusty old churches or tired music halls where the demographic was very rarely young composers, especially female ones,' she recalls, with a shudder. Armed with a continued passion for composing and for classical music, Elizabeth withdrew from traditional methods and turned to her childhood dreams of forming a band and performing as a singer.

The resulting conversion to pop saw her form A Scandal In Bohemia with some of her college classmates in 2006. Undoubtedly Brighton's greatest lost talent, A Scandal made outrageous, freewheeling noise combining prog, free jazz, dark folk and pop; baffling, charming and freaking out their small-but-loyal group of admirers in turn. A Scandal in Bohemia ended when Elizabeth left the band in 2009 to concentrate on the altogether more focussed art of Gazelle Twin.

Elizabeth intends Gazelle Twin to be an ever-changing project that allows her total creative freedom and versatility. To this end, she is designing an ambitious stage show that you’ll never see third on the bill at the local Barfly; a show that uses costume, lighting, nine virtuoso musicians and influences ranging from Paul Auster, J.G. Ballard, existentialism and eschatology to Fever Ray, Portishead and Dirty Projectors to create a visual equivalent to the melancholy and mysterious beauty of The Entire City. She promises ‘an immersive, audio-visual experience, very different from a usual “gig” vibe – more like a film with a live soundtrack or theatre show.’

In a contemporary milieu where even X Factor contestants get to call themselves ‘artists’, Gazelle Twin makes no apology for being Art, with a big old capital ‘A’. Her vision is uncompromising, vivid and unpredictable, and her potential as performer, singer, composer and visual stylist is limitless.

Every now and again, a genius arrives, seemingly out of nowhere. Elizabeth Walling aka Gazelle Twin is one of those rarities, taking her first giant steps on the road to everywhere.

Garry Mulholland
October 2009