Gazelle Twin – The Visitor (Original Soundtrack) – Well those Gazelle Twin fingerprints are there from the start, it could be no one else but her on that opening two minute piece, Cold War Rising. Let’s explore this before we end the day. Released at midnight, about an hour ago now, this is Gazelle Twin’s original score for the BBC Radio 4 drama, The Man Who Fell To Earth. We’re talking “Fractured radio transmissions, alien technologies and the arid intensity of the desert are depicted with analogue synthesisers, theremin and disintegrating piano samples to form Gazelle Twin’s soundtrack”
This is very much her soundtrack side rather than a “proper” Gazelle Twin album, not that this isn’t proper, it doesn’t come with the intensity, the emotion, or indeed the black dogs that a full on Gazelle Twin album does. As a piece of music, as a set of fourteen pieces of music, analogue keyboard pieces, some as short as half a minute, other pieces as long as seven and a bit minutes, this is very easy on the ear. This is a bath in warm electronic composition, as a collection of pieces of music this is all rather soothing, beautiful, quite, almost still, some of it with a slightly sinister or maybe a foreboding undertone, some wicked this way comes?
Hey, I make no secret of my admiration for and of the art of Elizabeth Bernholz and her work as Gazelle Twin, she really is an exceptional electronic music composer, producer, musician and indeed performer, her last “proper” album Black Dog was our album of the year last year here at Organ, the recently released album of “ghost” or “shadow” versions of tracks from Black Dog featuring reinterpretations by Keeley Forsyth, Gary Numan, Mark Jenkin, Marta Salogni, Penelope Trappes, Sealionwoman and more may well figure highly in this year’s best of list once we actually get to the end of the year and post it.
The Visitor is a soothing album, a painterly piece of work, a beautifully slow moving piece of graceful composition, there are dark suggestions, undercurrents, I should point out at this point I haven’t heard the play this was soundtracking, a play based on the Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel The Man Who Fell To Earth, I have seen the 1976 science fiction film of the same name directed by Nicolas Roeg and starring David Bowie a number of times and yes, this does fit rather well with those images of the very thin orange-haired white duke running in my head as Gazelle Twin’s music plays here in the early hours of the morning (surely someone is going to be tempted to overdub this soundtrack to Roeg’s film? Surely it will be up on YouTube before the week is out?).
Really not sure how she manages to make something minimally instrumental like this sound like no one else but Gazelle Twin and hey, yes two hours of playing it now and cor, that’s a nice bit in the middle of Newton’s Empire, yes this is good, and wow, that bit! But you knew all this already, you know it was well worth waiting up for the midnight release (although if I was to go to bed now it would still be early for me, there’s more paint to throw before the day is over). This is making for fine early morning listening as we think about the days becoming longer again (Winter Solistice is 9.21am on Saturday, we are two and a bit hours into Friday now). Once again, recommended, as everything she does is, go enjoy the bath, especailly the sinister bits… (sw)
Previously on these pages
ORGAN: Our best 43 albums of a very musically busy 2023. Who did we rate?
ORGAN THING: Gazelle Twin’s Then You Run soundtrack, she’s just so on it right now…
THE ORGAN 