Gazelle Twin: ‘Absent Sitters was born out of the fascination with a seance’

Elizabeth Berholz, aka Gazelle Twin. Picture: Victor Frankowski

Two years on from the disquieting electronic sound collages of her third album Pastoral, that skewered British nationalism in the wake of the Brexit referendum, Gazelle Twin returns with an audio-visual project for York Mediale.

Absent Sitters is described as a virtual seance in which an online audience will be guided by a performer medium to investigate what is live performance in 2020.

Musician, composer and performer Elizabeth Bernholz, aka Gazelle Twin, developed the work in collaboration with the artist and film maker Kit Monkman and Ben Eyes and Jez Wells at the University of York Music Department.

“It has kind of transformed over time,” Bernholz says. “We’ve been working on it since last October. We’ve had a year of lots of research and development, lots of meetings and interesting conversations and tests with the technology.

“The scope for it was quite wide. York Mediale were very kind to commission something that didn’t necessarily have a set outcome, so we had a really wide framework to work with but we knew that it would be centred around performance and to some degree music.”

The premise built on Bernholz’s holistic approach to music-making. “The way that I create music isn’t just to write it and perform it, there’s a lot more to it. There’s a story behind it, there’s usually a persona and a theme,” she says. “The premise initially was to use that concept and work with these wonderful other artists in creating something that was like a new art form.

“Over time we experimented with all sorts of things. Our early talks were about virtual experiences and using virtual reality tech, which is something that Kit uses in his work sometimes, he works mostly with screen-based visuals and also public art experiences using screen-based technology and also a lot of musical technology. In my work I use vocal augmentation, or electronic equipment to alter my voice, so we were just messing around with that for a good six months, having a lot of fun.”

By the start of 2020 they had decided to focus on “performance without a performer”, developing an idea that Bernholz had done once before based on “a piece of music for performance without me being present performing it, so having other performers but also my voice being present in the music itself”.