Music

This has not been written with AI.

I’m going to make this an honest account, not a bio! 

I’ve always been about creating layered sound that implies deeper internal realities and transitions. Vertical harmony (chord progressions) inspired me in music much more than horizontal melody; lyrics and melody often came last in my process. Growing up harmony-singing at the piano and in choirs thanks to my mother, a choral music teacher, and listening to bands like the Beach Boys and lush pop productions of 70's, 80's and then 90s music was my musical foundation. 

I spent most of my school years in Canberra - as a young teen I learned flute and then a wide range of orchestral percussion in a symphonic youth orchestra. Influenced hugely then by bands like New Order, Scritti Politti, The Smiths, Howard Jones, Propaganda, and so on, I bought my first ESQ sequencer at about 19 and began experimenting with creating pretty clunky electronic bits of music. I graduated to an Atari and e-64 sampler after completing a Contemporary Music BA up in Lismore.  I majored in composition and music video, but was invited to join a touring 8-piece a capella group that went overseas, competing and performing in the US. I really enjoyed being a harmony singer in a small semi-pro a capella group (even though the repertoire was pretty dated).

I was in Melbourne after that for a few years in a duo with a partner of mine - me singing, him on guitar.  I also worked on a few indie films as a camera and then a lighting assistant, before realising I wanted to focus on making my own music.  I worked with another guitarist for a year or so and we recorded a few tracks that we co-wrote, very much in the style of the Cocteaus but with a bit more overdriven / flange guitar (a few of these ended up on the first cassette, Aer Purus).  

At 25 I hitched around Western Australia and finally moved back to Sydney (where I was born). I was really impacted by Cocteau Twins, Lush, Curve, My Bloody Valentine; I preferred vocals woven into the texture as another instrument layer (as per the production style of a lot of 90’s music). I immediately met up with and then moved in with a musical mentor who was then in a sampling electronic band on Volition, and he had a massive impact on me both personally and musically (and, both negatively and positively). The very same year I met another huge musical influence (Shane Fahey) who I ended up working for eventually. He then became a partner (for awhile), collaborator and long-term friend.

Field recordings, spoken word, open guitar tunings running through effect chains, and electronic instrumentation eventually became my instruments for evoking atmosphere and inner landscapes. I had basic keyboard (and music theory thanks to Mum); in my mid-20’s I taught myself to play guitar my own way, devising shapes in different tunings for rhythm playing (beyond basic chords in standard tuning, which I did learn).

A highlight during those times ('95-'97) was forming and writing for a four-piece female vocal group Lumania, which featured phonetic vocal pieces I'd improvised, multi-tracked, drowned in effects and then taught to four pretty amazing women - Lauren Freedman, Tara Millet, Jacqueline Freeman (pictured) - who are all still making music today. Unfortunately we didn't last, but it was an amazing quartet for awhile. You could hear a pin drop when we performed (in a good way)! They very willingly learnt my twisty phonetic backwards vocal parts by ear.

During a stint in the Blue Mountains, when releasing the first CD I did independently (Self-Raising Flower) a little CD launch at a venue there, assisted by Jodi Phillis, Robyne Dunne and Eleanor Sapir - in this photo they’re singing one of those Lumania songs with me.

Back in Sydney I later managed Shane Fahey's fledgling label Endgame Records for nearly five years from 2004 to 2009 and was able to put that first CD out through Endgame that I'd made earlier partly on a Tascam 688 Portastudio and partly at Airmotion (downstairs at Megaphon) with Shane. We were ultimately able to get decent etailer distribution through The Orchard, so the song Close did pretty well digitally for an indie release thanks to streaming services grouping me into Cocteau Twins-style online radio selections.

Shane and I laboured over the next album Last Days of Home in Megaphon Studios during studio downtime for years...which was much harder and took its toll. Liz Smith (drums), Adrian Legg (bass), Jon Purcell (who is a massively underrated guitarist with a fantastic sound) plus Kent Steedman and Lloyd G doing extra bits played on this with me. 

I never found it easy to mount performances, and honestly it rarely worked.  I couldn't get enough momentum going long enough to work through the problems with live performance on my own. I found my singing suffered when I also was controlling keyboards and samples, and multiple vocals were hard to recreate until recently.  I often wished I could have just met the right people to form a band I was co-songwriting in, but it just didn’t happen like that. Moving around a lot (catering to my dingo-cross I adopted in 1998, needing to be near bushland and cheaper rents) didn't help.

So, I've mostly worked solo, working to realise the sounds I hear internally. I know collaboration creates better music, but I've found it difficult to compromise when the collaboration diverges from my 'aural vision' - what my inner ears want to realise first before changes ensue.

I worked on Sounds of Homes with Shane over about five years which began around the time the last of our property at Kioloa (the house) was sold.  This loss of access to our land and house had a very big, long-lasting impact on me as it was the place that truly felt like home to me.  I began going there when I was six months old, returning every holiday period, and later lived there full-time during two different periods for about a year each, as well as returning there regularly while living where work was (until the house was sold in 2005).

Since then, I’ve moved around a lot, returning to Sydney at various times.  I went into Conservation and Land Management for a number of years, travelled to Findhorn in 2009, owning a dingo-cross rescue for about 8 years, buying land in an ecovillage, finally selling it, and scraping by much of the time.  I began a new EP in 2017/2018 while I was still living in the Bega area (where I had land in BEND ecovillage for 8 years), worked on it while travelling overseas in the UK and finished it back in Sydney. This was Wherever You Are, and it's a lot more electronic, ambient with a bit of jangly guitar in there still. (I am now reworking some of these tracks for re-release through Endgame channels.)

While in the UK I was greatly inspired by Martin Christie's Electronic Music Open Mic nights, and I participated in a few during 2017 and 2018. In 2019 I started an EMOM chapter in Sydney. More on that below...

There is plenty more personal stuff I could say about this journey, as a woman who strove to make electronic-ish music in Australia for a long time.  Maybe that’s for blog entries.  I’m no longer living in Sydney.  After many years of practicing vocal harmonics (overtoning) and doing various trainings in Sound Healing, I’m beginning to practice as a Sound Healer specialising in voice, now.

After coming back to Sydney in 2018 from the UK, I founded and ran the first Sydney EMOM in January 2019, monthly for six months, then handed over to others. This video compilation was filmed collaboratively during that first six months, and edited by Cat Colman (with thanks!).

The east coast fires of late 2019 followed by the pandemic in 2020 brought things to a halt. Stewart Lawler has since revived EMOM Sydney on a bi-monthly basis, bigger and better than ever: find EMOM Sydney on Instagram, Facebook and Youtube.