Gazelle Twin - The Entire City

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).
Sci-fi looms large in Gazelle Twin's aesthetic. “I pretty much watched Aliens every day from the age of 10
to 14. I love the materials, the goo, it's all very sensual. And I like ominous projections of the future, like JG
Ballard. I'm inspired by bleak landscapes, industrial things...”
A somewhat more archaic and arcane influence is Carlo Gesualdo, a 16th/17th century Italian composer
whose bizarre, guilt-wracked madrigals she encountered while working on a commission for Brighton Early
Music Festival.

All of which will feed in to The Gazelle Twin's debut album The Entire City, named after a painting by the
aforementioned Ernst and due for release in July. It will possess, Walling promises, a “focused, dreamlike
intensity”, and aim to be an “unusual, emotional, danceable, memorable, frightening” listen.
There will be concerts, too. The first, and so far the only, Gazelle Twin live happening took place at
the now-defunct Shunt Vaults under London Bridge station, but Walling has ambitious plans for future
shows, involving every member of the band being as extravagantly attired as herself. It will, she promises,
be “an immersive, audio-visual experience, very different from a usual 'gig' vibe – more like a dream or
hallucination.”

It will doubtless also involve her self-made short films. So far, these have been exercises in no-budget
improvisation, with old horror movies, scuba video of manta rays and home-made webcam footage edited
together on her laptop. For the third single “Men Like Gods”, however, she's pushed the boat out with
a proper shoot in Sardinia, involving a bizarre, Wicker Man-esque pagan ritual, “with bells and furs and
masks and skins and bonfires.”
The one certain thing about Gazelle Twin is that nothing is certain. The aesthetic is an ever-developing
thing: “I want it to change all the time. I intend the thing to constantly morph into different areas...”
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It may have feathers and it may have wings, but it's neither of those things. And
whatever you've decided Gazelle Twin is, that's probably what it was five minutes ago, while Elizabeth
Walling was already planning her next move.
Simon Price, March 2011

Press Quotes for The Entire City:

"The Entire City: Inspired by, variously, the stark synthpop of The Knife/Fever Ray, choral madrigals and
1980s Prince at his most spooked, this is an album which hints at subconscious fears and will haunt you
long after listening."
The Independent on Sunday 5/5

"A feast for the ears"
Clash Magazine Essential Ten

"Setting herself out as one of the year's brightest breakthrough talents"
Artrocker 4/5

"Divinely dreamy, but freakily fractured and frankly disturbing, suggests Fever Ray trapped in a
bathosphere with Burial"
Guardian Music

"a dream-like tableau evoking Bjork, The Dirty Projectors and Vienna’s Soap & Skin as well as
Andersson’s sly gift for otherness. At times it plays like a surrealist nightmare, with teeth in all the wrong
places..."
The Quietus

Financial Times (Album Review), July 2011
(4 out of 5 stars) 'Gazelle Twin’s debut album comes armed with forbidding cultural references. The Entire
City takes its title from a series of Max Ernst paintings; songs pay tribute to HG Wells and 16th-century
composer William Byrd. Elizabeth Walling, the Brighton-based musician behind the project, channels
all this into an impressive art-rock soundtrack with brooding synths reminiscent of The Knife, dramatic
percussion and eerie singing like PJ Harvey at her most enigmatic and gothic.'

The Independent (Album Review), July 2011
(5 out of 5 - Outstanding) 'Gazelle Twin is the alter-ego of Sussex based Elizabeth Walling, an avant-garde
musician with aspirations towards mixed-media art. But it's gonna take a big, big budget for the live visuals
to match the projections which The Entire City throws on to the back wall of your brain, unaided. Inspired
by, variously, the stark synthpop of The Knife/Fever Ray, choral madrigals and 1980s Prince at his most
spooked, this is an album which hints at subconscious fears and will haunt you long after listening.'

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