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Gazelle Twin – Then You Run – Original Score (Invada Records) – Well, now Death Drive, just go play Death Drive and well, whooooosh! Fresh from that amazing performance with NYX celebrating the soundtrack to Wicker Man that happened just south of Summerisle over at the Barbican here in London a couple of weeks ago, Gazelle Twin is filling our days with a new soundtrack of her own. It is wrong to say these pieces feel like sketch book pieces?  Actually they’re far too fully formed for that to be the case, although being incidental music they don’t really need that much of a beginning or an end, they are essentially there to colour the visuals, add (to the) atmosphere, they don’t need to be completely rounded, yet this does feel like an album as we await her next album proper. Mostly instrumental,  rather beguiling, even the sinister bits (and there are lots of sinister bits), dark, beautiful, alive, it reminds us of that Burial album, that English psycho-geology, those edgelands, those late night backwaters around the Lee Valley, dark industrial places, dimly lit, cafes with no people, just a light in the window. Then You Run has pretty much been on repeat here for the last two days, Gazelle Twin really is on a creative roll right now and I hadn’t really read the bit regarding what the TV show was actually about before the observations above above were made –         

“Gazelle Twin, aka composer, producer, singer, and visual artist Elizabeth Bernholz, has scored Sky’s brand new TV series Then You Run. Created for television by Ben Chanan (The Capture), based on the novel YOU by Zoran Drvenkar, Then You Run follows four rebellious London teenagers on a city getaway to Rotterdam. This contemporary eight-part series boasts an incredible cast of rising stars; Leah McNamara (Normal People) as Tara, Vivian Oparah (Rye Lane) as Stink, Yasmin Monet Prince (Hanna) as Ruth and newcomer Isidora Fairhurst as Nessi.

The four friends embark on what should have been the perfect summer break which soon spirals into a dark and perilous adventure. When their attempt to take on some of the most dangerous people in Europe doesn’t quite go to plan, they find themselves on the run with three kilos of heroin, more questions than answers about Tara’s family, and a gang of deadly criminals tracking their every move”.

We do keep saying it about Gazelle Twin, and I’m almost tempted to throw in something just a tiny bit negative in just for the sake of credibility, but really I can’t. That opening track, History, is classic Gazelle Twin, everything she’s doing right now is just so right, so vital, so nail-on-the-head. Actually that bit there sounds like a far darker piece of Ullulators, most of Then You Run is rather dark – colourfully so though, so much lush colour in the details of the darkness, in the spaces between the notes, the breathing,the dark just beyond the eyeline. Hey, look, everything here is right, there’s a depth, as we’ve said before, there’s a depth to pretty much everything she is doing right now, need I go on? Gazelle Twin is just on it.  (sw)    

Bandcamp

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Invada Records have previously released two recent Gazelle Twin scores (2020’s Nocturne and 2021’s The Power).

Previously on these pages

ORGAN THING: Musics from Summerisle at the Barbican, celebrating The Wicker Man. The Summerisle Stramash Ensemble were wonderful, Gazelle Twin and NYX were just wow!

Summerisle Stramash Ensemble / Gazelle Twin and Nyx at the Barbican Hall, London, June 2023 – And so we find ourselves, a couple of days on from the Summer Solstice, gathering in the concrete brutalism of London’s Barbican (where a heron surveys us from the roof top as we sit awaiting the opening of the… read on