Glossolalia | We're Not Afraid of the Dark

(Gail Priest & Matt Warren)

Digitial Release
April 2023
room40

We’re Not Afraid of the Dark is the sensing-sounding collaboration of Matt Warren and Gail Priest. Fueled by shared interests in dark ambient, post-industrial and folk-inflected electronica, We’re Not Afraid of the Dark’s music manifests through intuition, improvisation and interconnection. This recording documents a concert that accompanied a two-part exhibition of the same name.

This performance illustrates their preferred structure in which each artist presents a short solo, one segueing into the other, then extending into a collaborative exploration of their offered material, a conversation and mutual call and response. Sitting on either side of the performance space, Matt and Gail attempt to transmit and receive hidden messages at a distance. A blend of organic field recordings and live vocal material projects orphic sounds and data.

https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/glossolalia

 

paravox

Digitial Release
January 2023
Metal Bitch Recordings MB009

Paravox is an EP-length work comprising five pieces in which Gail explores the voice and its relation to, through and with machines. It is composed for headphones using binaural spatialisation for maximum immersion. (Stereo bonus tracks for speaker playback are included with download purchase.)

The relationship between voice and machine is an ongoing preoccupation of Gail's that grows out of the conflicted feelings she has about her voice.  She uses machines to mediate her voice so that she can escape its awkward organicness. She  also employs machines as improvising and compositional partners. Machines speak their own language and she tries to find creative and critical ways to converse with them.

paravox was developed as part of the snoSound project with thanks to Ian Andrews. 

See www.sno.org.au/snosound for an essay response by Miyuki Jokiranta.

https://gailpriest.bandcamp.com/album/paravox

 

homeopathic waft of signal - elbejée

Digital album + Limited edition CD
(professional duplication & printing)
November 2019
Metal Bitch Recordings MB008

Homeopathic waft of signal is the debut album of improvisational explorations by elbejée (Kathy Hinde [UK] and Gail Priest [Aus]). Recorded amongst rutting frogs and all watched over by feisty Shetland cows, these three pieces combine field recordings, synthesised bleeps, processed vocals, mechanised singing bowls, self-playing gongs, bird whistles, wind-up bugs, and bespoke vinyl. 

This is what happens when you put two verbally vivacious, intellectually voracious, conceptually aligned yet practically divergent sound artists in an architecturally designed eco-pod for three weeks in the Scottish Highlands. These pieces form a natural continuum of their realworld hypertextual kitchen conversations covering curry recipes, phenomenology, cheap wine appreciation, speculative realism, DIY electronics and the joys of British bird watching.

https://gailpriest.bandcamp.com/album/homeopathic-waft-of-signal

 

Songs from the Omega Point

Digital album +  [ Limited edition CD-R
Handmade CDR packaging + mini essay insert -SOLD OUT]
July 2019
Metal Bitch Recordings MB007

A post-anthroposcenic package tour to a sun gone supernova.

In this concise concept EP Priest offers field recordings from the future composed into four sonic fictions. Most post-apocalyptic imaginings are dark but this future is bright — blindingly, searingly, flesh meltingly bright. But don’t despair, life goes on, just not as we know it.

The Omega Point (by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Frank Tipler) proposes that humans will eventually evolve into post-human entities who will disperse across the universe, omnsicient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Songs from the Omega Point proposes how this universe and its life forms might sound. Pulsar winds dance with solar flares; ejaculations of plasma twirl with molten magma; and electromagnetic radiation self-organises into tiny-tuned transmissions. Freed from flesh and carbon, these entities’ songs are curiously playful and optimistic, with a superhero cartoonish naivety. It’s an intergalactic adventure and you are free to add your own thought bubbles.

https://gailpriest.bandcamp.com/album/songs-from-the-omega-point

 

We're not afraid of the dark (live)

‘We’re not afraid of the dark’ is the document of a live concert that presents Gail Priest & Matt Warren both performing short solos that seamlessly segue into a 20 minute exploration of tone, drone, whispers, whistles, textural undertows and harmonic overflows. 

Their’s is an intuitive relationship in which their individual understandings of dark ambient, post-industrial and folk-inflected electronica come together to create a sound world that is equally ethereal and brutal, summoning the supernal by digging deep into the depths. 

Track breakdown 
0:00 Gail Priest, Orographic Wind 
12:15 Matt Warren, A New Threshold 
22:40 Priest & Warren, We’re not afraid of the dark 

https://gailpriest.bandcamp.com/album/were-not-afraid-of-the-dark-live

 

Heraclitus in Iceland

In Sept-Oct 2016 Gail undertook a residency in Olafsfjordur, an industrial fishing village in Northern Iceland, population 800. The eight compositions on Heraclitus in Iceland are based on field recordings in and around the town (the locations of which can be viewed on an interactive map) but they are far from pastoral meditations on idyllic landscapes. Certainly the natural elements of water and wind dominate but they are met head on with metal, the industrial clamour telling of the toughness required to survive in this harsh environment.

Combined with vocal and instrumental improvisations the figurative qualities of the manipulated field recordings are stretched and twisted to create portals through which the listener may travel to this beautiful brutal land to experience previously untold folktales, forgotten ghost stories and suspected alien invasions.

Early in her residency the ubiquity of water (melted ice) got Gail thinking about the adage “you cannot step twice into the same river,” attributed to the 5th Century BC philosopher Heraclitus The Obscure. She found he had some other interesting things to say that added to her ruminations of this curious locale. Twenty-first century mediation means that every place now feels familiar but in many ways Gail found this small fishing town uncanny and inscrutable, leaving her feeling as strangely misplaced as if in fact she were the ancient Heraclitus, transported across time to far Northern Iceland.

Availabe through Bandcamp, iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Googleplay etc.

Heraclitus in Iceland is one part of the Songmapping Ólafsfjörður project undertaken during the Nor∂andvindur: North Wind Sound Art Residency, Listhus, Iceland, Sept-Oct 2016

 

Reviews for Heraclitus in Iceland

With a refined musical sensibility, this album explores green field-recordings and sculpted sound waves, slowly moving droney variations, acoustic resonances, metallic reverbs, vocal mantra-like improvs, and timbral manipulations on various objects. A reflective, cerebral and moodily introspective travel through natural elements and atmospheres of deep quietness.
Igloo Magazine - full review

Carefully balanced, original instrumentation and beautiful vocalisations: this album is a refreshing surprise and another proof that Iceland is a huge source of creativity and inspiration for those open to it.
Ambient Blog - full review

Through melodies that slur across the skies like dark clouds, or voices that sigh like a lethargic, phantom dawn chorus, Priest turns Olafsfjordur into scenic setting for the mind’s more complex deviations of thought...
ATTN:Magazine - full review

Priest’s diverse skills yield a wide variety of timbres. “Rusted Rituals” seeps glissandos and drones, echoing the sorrow of sailors drowned at sea…The winds of “Home Moan” are met by siren choirs as they whip against neighborhood flagpoles, an invitation to a shipwreck. Yet as Priest turns her attention to streams, churches, and ultimately to the Northern Lights, the mood shifts from doom to delight. Above, below and all around, wonders are waiting to be heard.
A closer listen - full review

 

The Common Koel

You first realise that a Common Koel has come to stay at around 5am on an October morning. His nagging squawk will continue sometime until March, when he will return to more northern climes. Over those long four months his monotonous bleating will have attracted him a lady friend (who is nowhere near as noisy) and their avian passion will have resulted in an egg, left in some other poor bird’s nest.

Common Koels don’t have nice manners and they don’t have a pretty song. I was interested in working with the Koel’s material—aesthetically awkward, perhaps even repellent—to find new ways of integrating and manipulating field recording. Taking lessons from the bird, the resulting piece explores infiltration, imitation and subjugation as strategies.

Reviews for The Common Koel

Gail Priest enters into a remarkable cross-species dialogue……Priest appears to be performing the imaginary Philip Glass score to Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Stephen Fruitman, Igloo Magazine. Full review

It’s as if Priest is puppeteering the parasitic birds with an unholy invention, a swirling of wings aligning with the occult. Many of the pieces in this series have been ambient with birds integrated within, but Gail Priest’s Common Koel plays out like a creation myth with scary implications.
Nayt Keane, A closer listen. Full review

She uses various processing techniques to turn the sound of the koel into a reverberating wash of noise and a metrically regular melody, before launching into a retro sci-fi-esque number featuring an impressive human vocal performance competing with the avian one.
Fluid Radio. Full review

A cyberspace of insanity is built bit by bit, terrifically sinister synth-like strings waft in the background, and whatever the current pattern or surface of them is, beyond the shrubbery of textures the koel rests. The finale is incredibly weird, paganism is all over this piece...
Ambient Exotica. Full review

Available from Flaming Pines Bandcamp

 

blue | green

blue | green
kate carr | gail priest
vinyl LP 12 inch
September 2012
Flaming Pines/Metal Bitch Recordings (FLP011/MB004)

An exploration of a slice of the spectrum by Kate Carr (Flaming Pines) & Gail Priest (Metal Bitch Recordings).The ice cold cool of blue, meets the regenerative power of green in a new vinyl LP by Kate Carr and Gail Priest. blue | green presents a sonic interrogation of two colours packed full of allusions, metaphors, associations and even clichés.

Kate Carr’s blue charts a story of sailors and tides, inky nights and lonesome journeys. From bursts of radio static to the crackle of old records, receding tides and forgotten chants, blue moves from choppy seas to dark ponds and lost tales before closing with a delicate rain shower.

Through green Gail Priest plumbs the sounds of her own backyard—the greenness of crickets, wild winds through leaves, raindrops on palm fronds and the dark dampness of the wormfarm. Emerging from this verdant landscape are half heard melodies and eerie voices, alluding to secret songs and forgotten spirits.

The final piece on both sides see Carr and Priest exploring the ambiguous terrain where blue and green converge. The artists swapped samples remixing and re-working them into closers which tip toe around the edges of perception to paint a greeny-blue landscape or perhaps one of bluey-green.

Reviews for blue | green

We’ve seen a few color-based releases already this year…Kate Carr and Gail Priest‘s new release is a wonderful addition to this collection…
Richard Allen, A closer listen. Full review

This is a fascinating release that demonstrates the powerful journeys that can be experienced through sound. This is very much an album that needs to be heard in full to be fully appreciated (or at least each side in full). However those that take on the journey will discover some amazing experiences!
Tomatrax. Full review

Wordless vocals emerge alongside the rustling of winds, at the same time as dark pulsations introduce an undercurrent of Coil-like unease, and, at disc's end, blue seeps into Priest's “Grue Bleen” to deepen the sense of foreboding and hallucination. Textura. Full Review

http://gailpriest.bandcamp.com/album/blue-green

 

Presentiments from the Spider Garden

Second full length release courtesy of Endgame Records. Presentiments from the Spider Garden weaves together field recordings, vocals, instrumental material and extended digital methodologies to create an album that challenges, charms and transports the listener to a mirror-world of revolutionary battles, natural histories and strange alchemies.

Reviews for Presentiments...

The author, enigmatic and hypnotic in the performance, doesn't shy away from capturing the listener's attention…Priest is always fully [in] control of the atmospheres, which sparkle imaginatively but are neither trivial nor predictable because of that.
Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural, March 2011 (see full review)

[A]n engaging, enigmatic and hypnotic work…
Oliver Laing, Cyclic Defrost, Dec 2010 (see full review)

[U]nanticipated exotic territories…There are many creatures in Priest's garden besides common spiders.Caleb Deupree, Furthernoise, Dec 2010 (see full review)

[A] deeply rewarding album… Fred Nolan, The Muse in Music Nov 2010, (see full review)

https://endgamerecords.bandcamp.com/album/presentiments-from-the-spider-garden

 

Fear of Stranglers

Digital Release   [CD-R SOLD OUT]
March 2010
Metal Bitch Recordings MB003

6 tracks composed over 2009/2010. Extreme vocals and drone guitars, multiply manipulated to make moody soundscapes teettering between lullaby and nightmare.

Review for Fear of Stranglers

Gail Priest has been exploring the timbre and elasticity of sound in a way that has become distinctly her own…[Fear of Stranglers] shows her taking her vocal and sonic manipulations to new levels of textural improvisation and processing…Treading a tightrope between darkness and light, texture and space, Priest creates sound worlds that never feel too gloomy or melancholic. It is this duality in her work which keeps refreshing her sound and charting new directions.
Roger Mills, Furthernoise June 2010

https://gailpriest.bandcamp.com/album/fear-of-stranglers

 

28 Songs for a City: Tokyo

[Limited edition Double CD-R | SOLD OUT]
January 2009
Metal Bitch Recordings MB002

Over 28 days I went to different locations in Tokyo to make audio recordings. I listened to the sounds around me and then sang back what I heard, improvising a small tune with the city.

These samples were then manipulated, working with the narrative arc of the recording, to bring out the character of the site. No extra vocal material was added: through editing, filtering, effecting and overlaying, I hoped to draw out the songs of the city.

 

Imaginary conversations in reverberant rooms

CD and digital download
November 2006
Metal Bitch Recordings MB001

Imaginary conversations in reverberant rooms is the debut CD from Gail Priest released on her own label Metal Bitch Recordings Nov 2006

Restlessly pacing between music and sound art, Imaginary conversations weaves broken melodies, splintered rhythms, multi-processed vocals and other digital debris into potent atmospheres and near-future fantasies.

Imaginary conversations… is co-produced by Sydney sound artists Julian Knowles, Peter Blamey & Jasper Streit.

Reviews for Imaginary Conversations...

The eight compositions are translucent, surgically precise and pleasingly uncluttered.
Paris Pompor, Metro - Sydney Morning Herald (full review)

Priest weaves her ethereal vocal deconstructions … and textural sonic works into a shifting range of sound fields from essential IDM rhythms to more static states of tone and aural intricacy.
Lawrence English, Cyclic Defrost #15, (full review)

I can only recommend listening to this album for yourself as it is as curious as it is enthralling.
Stacey Sewell, Furthernoise (full review)

She lets slip the incompleteness of any human discourse; 'there always seems to be something left to say'… at once a thrillingly openended idea, reflecting the gaping chasms of possibility evoked by this album.
David Stubbs, Wire 276 (full review)

https://gailpriest.bandcamp.com/album/imaginary-conversations-in-reverberant-rooms

Compilations

Gail's work has also appeared on numerous compilations including:

Oceanian PhoNographic Mornings, Each Morning of the World #05, 2018

Intone: Voice Abstractions, Clan Analogue, 2015

Ladyz in Noyz: Vol 2, Corpus Callosum, 2014

Tiny Portraits, Flaming Pines, 2013

Wonderwerp, Den Haag, Audition Records, 2011

SALON BRUIT - Berlin, Audition Records, 2011

New Weird Australia: Vol 5 - 2010

Furthernoise: Explorations in Sound Vo:3, 2008

Liquid Architecture, 2006

Melatonin - room40

© Gail Priest 2023 | based on a template by Mashup