BIOGRAPHY
 BY SIMON PRICE
- EDITED JAN 2012

“I want it to change all the time. I intend the thing to constantly morph into different areas...”

Fittingly, biographical details about Gazelle Twin – a shadowy entity who creates unsettlingly beautiful, hypnotically haunting musical Art with a capital 'A' - are scant. 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 so many female pop or indie artists give in to this fashion of appearing sexually available and perfect... not that sex is wrong, but there's so much more to a person's character that has nothing to do with gender, 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 with my face on show, I'd be inclined to be meek and apologetic between songs.” Nevertheless, Walling does not hide herself merely to present an 'alter ego' or 'dark side of the self'. 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 costumes, she says “They are different forms through which I'm trying to render my human self, 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.

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).

Her self-made films, so far have been exercises in no-budget improvisation, with found footage, scuba video of manta rays and home-made webcam footage edited together on her laptop. For the third single “Men Like Gods”, however, she pushed the boat out with a location shoot in Sardinia, involving a bizarre, Wicker Man-esque pagan ritual, “with bells and furs and masks.”

Sci-fi looms large in Gazelle Twin's aesthetic. “I watched Aliens nearly every day as a kid. I love the materials, the goo, it's all very sensual. And I'm drawn to ominous projections of the future, like JG Ballard. I'm inspired by bleak landscapes...”. 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 feed in to Gazelle Twin's debut album The Entire City, named after a painting by the aforementioned Ernst, released in July 2011 through her co-run label, Anti-Ghost Moon Ray Records.

Already, Gazelle Twin's debut has earned acclaim everywhere from Time Out (single of the week for her cover of Prince's I Wonder U) to a coveted 5 star album review in The Guardian. Naturally there have been 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 in live performances.

Walling has an ambitious vision for her live shows, involving every member of the band being as extravagantly attired as herself. Live shows are, she promises, “an attempt to create an immersive experience, hopefully different from a usual 'gig' vibe and more like a dream or hallucination.”

The one certain thing about Gazelle Twin is that nothing is certain. Her aesthetic is an ever-developing thing: “I want it to change all the time. I intend the thing to constantly morph into different areas...”.