Keeley Forsyth & Gazelle Twin in conversation

We’ve gathered together ahead of their respective performances at this year’s Rewire Festival in The Hague: Forsyth at the gothic Great Church across the street and Bernholz at the Royal Theatre a short walk away. Forsyth is performing her new album The Hollow in full, a month ahead of its street date, while Bernholz is bringing her ongoing Black Dog tour to the European mainland for the first time since the album was released last October. “It’s still new,” she insists. “It took five years to make so it’s going to be new for a while!”

On the surface, it may not seem as though the two women have all that much in common, musically speaking: Bernholz as the often brash and confrontational electronic artist Gazelle Twin, and Forsyth as the sonorous, almost wraithlike figure who refers to her voice in the third person, She. But the surface is no place to linger when listening to either artist. Scratch beneath it, and common threads appear.

Each Gazelle Twin release – from her cryptic and sometimes terrifying debut The Entire City (2011) through to the horror-in-its-veins Black Dog – is birthed within a very specific and visually-led conceptual framework. Often, this has compelled Bernholz to take on the appearance and physicality of her twisted creations, but with Black Dog she’s channelling the rawest parts of her psyche through something unexpected: herself. Her artistic statements may be assertive and loud but, as recently told to Jenny Hval, they “come from a place which is much more complex, fragile, quiet and awkward,” and Black Dog cuts a jagged spyhole into that inland empire of vulnerability.

Forsyth’s work, too, is interiorly driven, plumbing the depths of her churning torrents and serpentine black lakes. After working as an actor since her teens – her first major role was in stage school drama The Biz, and she recently featured in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things – Forsyth entered the music world just four years ago with Debris, a bleak and heuristic record that grew out of a traumatising period of illness that left her unable to speak. The Hollow is somehow already her third album, and second to be co-produced with electronic artist Ross Downes. It’s staggeringly good, taking bigger creative swings than ever with the Colin Stetson-featuring “Turning”, the spoken-word anthem for working women “A Shift”, and a generally queasy air of foreboding that’s as riveting as it is unknowable and fraught.

As it turns out, Bernholz and Forsyth have a lot more in common than I’d theorised. Their mutual friends include the actress Maxine Peake, whose latest production Robin/Red/Breast opens this week in Manchester and is soundtracked by Gazelle Twin. And, in a particularly strange coincidence, Oldham-born Forsyth now lives in the same North Yorkshire town as Bernholz’s parents, and where she grew up. “It’s a lovely place,” offers Forsyth. Bernholz recoils. “It… has its pros and cons.”

BEST FIT: I’m really glad that I could get you both in the same place here at Rewire. I wasn’t sure if you actually knew each other in real life, but obviously you do!

KEELEY FORSYTH: [laughs] Yeah, though I should say that we only met in person for the first time recently, when I went to see a Gazelle Twin show in Newcastle. It only feels like a few months ago but it was probably longer.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: It was in November last year, yeah. Bizarrely, we have crossed paths quite a few times since, including once just totally randomly in London.

KEELEY FORSYTH: Yeah, we just passed each other in the street. I think it’s funny when things like that happen. I do think that humans have some sort of inner guidance system that directs us into crossing paths with people we feel an affinity for. I remember when I first saw you play – gosh, years and years ago, before I even thought it was possible for me to navigate releasing my own music, or what that path would be – there was some kind of recognition there. I remember thinking, “Yeah, I think there will be a time when I’m really gonna stalk you.”

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: [laughs] Oh, wow! That puts things into a different perspective!

KEELEY FORSYTH: I’m kidding, but yeah, it doesn’t really surprise me that I would randomly bump into you.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: It is funny when paths just start to align. Well, you know, it’s just been amazing to discover you and your work. Experiencing your work has kind of been feeding back into my own feelings about mine, just in remembering why I do what I do and what I want my identity and focus in music to be, and how to make that cut through. I think we probably take quite different approaches to things, but your music inspires me. And I honestly don’t listen to a lot of music anymore.

KEELEY FORSYTH: I know exactly what you mean. I watch a lot of films, and I love to go and see dance and theatre pieces, but I have no idea about what’s going on in the music world. I’m not aware, really, of what music other people are making.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: I think there’s a lot of value in not listening to other stuff, actually. With my work, it’s the visual input that’s most important to me.

KEELEY FORSYTH: When I first saw you play live, I think it was part of BBC Three’s Late Junction Festival at EartH in Hackney. I was with Maxine and it was honestly so inspiring to see someone who was not only a successful musician but also crossing over into theatre and performance art. And your voice! It’s incredible. Skilled, trained, really solid. I’ve never really thought about ‘fitting in’, but seeing you take all of those elements into your performance was almost like a permission to do what I had been wanting to do. Just like listening to Scott Walker records was a permission to do it. Seeing you live inspired me, in a way, to reach for that experience in my own work.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: I love that the first time you saw me was in my jester costume, which was probably the maddest thing I’ve ever done. You must have thought, ‘Ohhh-kay.’

KEELEY FORSYTH: No, I loved it! You can ask Maxine, we were going crazy about it.

I remember being at what I think was maybe the first ever Gazelle Twin show in London. At a place called Shunt Vaults, way back in 2010. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: Oh wow, yeah. I hadn’t even released my first album then and was sort of working things out for this freakish idea that I’d had. It felt amazing to do that show, even though it was a really weird one. Things weren’t quite right at that stage. I think I ran things off of an iPod. That was the first show where I did something to cover myself. I think I used a curtain. I remember I was playing really high up in this weird little hole in the wall in this cavernous underground venue, and people were like “Is it a he? Is it a she? Who knows?”

You’ve come a long way since then.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: Yeah, kind of [laughs]. I’ve always kept the DIY thing though.

Have you had a chance to see Keeley live?

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: No, not yet. I will at Rewire for the first time, and it feels like a really special show to see.

World premiere! As it’s described in the festival booklet.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: Yeah, no pressure!

KEELEY FORSYTH: Also known as under-rehearsed and kind of last minute [laughs].

This is the first of a series of shows I’m doing where I’ll play the new album from start to finish. Usually when I get offered to do shows, I’ll make something new for the performance and those are often songs that I’ll have no intention of recording. They just work in the context of the shows. But this time around, I did feel like I needed some kind of anchor and it just made sense to not just take elements from The Hollow but to perform the whole thing. For me, there always has to be some reason for why I’m doing what I’m doing, and it can be easy to overthink things. These full album performances feel more truthful, in a way.

I’ve been working for the first time with a nyckelharpa player, who is a lovely guy I work with at the Leeds Conservatoire. I was looking for a violinist and a viola player for these shows, and it turns out that this guy plays this Swedish instrument that’s sort of like both of those. It’s difficult sometimes, though, when you use an instrument that can really recall a certain genre or time or place, because I always want to try and go between genres rather than be any one thing. For me, I want to take it back to that DIY space that I understand, and to see the instrument as something new. It’s about trying to start again, always.

It’s interesting because the kind of theatre that I like is the more expressionist and absurd kind. It’s almost anti-entertainment, and that’s what I like in music too. I’m anti-sounding nice. Even if I’m using an instrument that has been used many times and in certain ways, I find that there are still ways to try and get underneath those familiarities or expectations.

Elizabeth, did you have a similar thought when you were bringing recorders into your work on the Pastoral album?

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: I’m not sure I thought so much about it, really. My writing process is very solitary and messy, using whatever’s within reach really. I’m quite lazy!

I knew I wanted to use recorders on Pastoral because I wanted something that echoed folk music. Something that was a bit Pied Piper-y. And, you know, it’s not really cool to play recorders, and I tend to want to go for the thing that isn’t cool because it’s bound to have something in it that I can use. I love recorder music, and early recorder music especially, and somehow the recorders became kind of a central motif of the album from there.

Although I love acoustic sounds, I don’t think I’ve ever performed an acoustic set. I use acoustic sounds as samples, mostly loops, so I am one or more stages removed from the actual instrument. I did play the recorder live at gigs, but, in general, I like things going through filters and different stages of processing. I get a kick out of making things into loops and making beat-based music in that context. It must be a completely different thing for you, Keeley.

KEELEY FORSYTH: Yeah, totally. With The Hollow, I worked really closely again with the producer, Ross Downes, and we know each other very well. He’s mostly an electronic musician. When we work together, I normally start the songs on an instrument that I can actually touch, something that I try and somehow make a part of me. Even if it’s just the physical act of leaning on it, like a harmonium, it gives me enough to try and understand what it is that I am hearing. The songs all start as vocal lines and then get fleshed out with whoever I am working with.

You’ve incorporated a bit more of an electronic flavour on The Hollow. Do you see yourself going further in that direction? Do you have a taste for it now?

KEELEY FORSYTH: I do really love that electronic sound and I would love to push that more. I’m just not very good with the software. My brain doesn’t work in that way. Or maybe it’s just because I am old now and feel like I have no patience for it. I just want to sing. I want to get on with things. I don’t have the patience to figure out all these computer programs. I think it’s because I was so late in starting to make and release music that I’ve just been raring to go. Working with Ross is great, because he’s good at trying to keep up with me as I’m going.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: I’m similar to Keeley in that the music comes from quite an immediate place. I don’t labour over the software too much. Honestly, the simpler the better for me. I don’t have loads of gear, and I probably do get a bit stuck in a rut with it sometimes, but I really do think that just having what’s immediately available to you is always the key to getting the most distilled version of what you’re trying to do.

I think that ties in with what we were saying earlier about not listening to music too much and having too many expectations. That has a load of benefits when you’re going at something and you’re ready to charge with it. I always want to let the songs come out as raw as they can be. When I’m recording, I’m often at that stage where I’ve been holding onto things – visuals, ideas and feelings – and storing them up for a really long time. My actual recording process doesn’t change all that much. It’s all quite messy. It’s almost like being a medium in the way that the songs come out, and I think that’s always a more interesting way to work. The potential for exciting chance encounters of different sounds and collisions of ideas is much greater, for me, than if I was being really strict and organised about things.

KEELEY FORSYTH: Did you study composition at university then?

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: Kind of. I just did a general music degree. But all the way through, I wanted to be a composer. I wanted to be writing classical music, orchestral music, and to get into film. I had this naïve vision of myself becoming this concert hall composer, but I very quickly abandoned that when I realised, firstly, that it wasn’t going to happen, and secondly, that I didn’t really want it to.

I never studied music and music theory at secondary school. Art and theatre and English were my focuses, but when I started to make music at home I realised that I’d have to go back and study GCSE music before I could go on to a music degree at uni. So everything was delayed a bit. Still, my knowledge of music theory is embarrassing. I feel like I don’t know anything about music at all. I just know what I’m doing, and trying to translate and communicate that to actual musicians can be quite a, um, fun process!

KEELEY FORSYTH: Gosh, yeah. I was going to say I’m the same, but so much worse. Whatever it is that you think you don’t know about music, I probably know a million times less.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: Well, do we need to though? Some of the greatest artists are not formally trained musicians. And, honestly, no one really cares.

One thing common to your music that I wanted to talk about is that, for both of you, in different ways, music making involves a certain degree of separation. Like, Elizabeth, you often hide your face and have even completely removed your person from the performance at one point. And Keeley, when you first started out you would say, “This is not my voice, this is a collective voice.” Has that changed for you at all, now that you are three albums in?

KEELEY FORSYTH: I do still say when doing soundcheck that She will be singing, and then I sometimes have to explain that I mean me [laughs]. You know, it’s a really weird thing to talk about. It just felt… not delicate, but sensitive in some way. Actually, that’s why seeing performance artists like Elizabeth was really important to me. It was the biggest thing for me to see someone working with that mystery and who understood how to go beyond the usual framework of playing a gig. Because I really struggled to understand what I wanted to do with that at first. But then I was like, ‘Actually, I just want to crawl on stage,’ and, as I said, seeing Elizabeth was kind of a permission to do that. So I did.

I think, in life, it’s always about trying to go towards what is a better feeling. And it’s a gradual thing. This feels better, and then this feels better. Making the work, you sort of follow that feeling and when you come out the other side of it there’s often this sense of separation of self. That’s what it is for me, anyway.

How about you, Elizabeth? On the Black Dog tour, you’ve been performing essentially as yourself, or at least a more recognisable version of yourself. Have the reactions from the audiences been different? Have you felt differently doing it?

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: Oh, yeah, I’ve felt differently. I wouldn't say that I'm 100% loving it. What I do like is that I get to sit down quite a lot [laughs].

KEELEY FORSYTH: Oh my god, I love that so much.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: Having direct eye contact with the audience has been… wow. It’s quite electrifying. I mean, I’ve always made eye contact with people, but of course they’ve never seen my eyes. It’s always just been my mouth that they’ve been presented with, and I’ve definitely been met by a lot of uneasy responses and people looking away in the past.

With the Black Dog tour, it’s a mixture. I’m coming in and out of focus. In and out of myself, really. There is one moment in the gig when I really am there, and I do address people, and it’s absolutely me on stage. But, yeah, otherwise I am going in and out of different versions of me, with different personalities or whatever you want to call it.

I think a lot of the material is still very present and raw, and it’s full on. It’s probably the most song-based show I’ve ever done, in terms of how much voice and control I need to use. It’s physically quite demanding, and also very emotionally demanding. More than ever. It can be quite hard work to not get a bit choked up sometimes, but I think the more I do it the more it becomes like a muscle memory or something.

I don’t think it’s necessarily about becoming removed from the material, but it is kind of a role. It’s still a bit quirky. I mean, I’m on stage with a lamp and an armchair and wearing this very shiny suit. But at the same time, as you say, this is the closest thing to 'me' that people have witnessed, and that felt necessary. There was no reason to cover myself this time, but I don’t know yet what come after that. Maybe eventually I’ll get to the point where I can just go on stage and not need any props or costume to perform.

I always think that it’s good to think about the inversion of what I’m doing, and what that might look like. It’s about asking myself whether it’s the right time and whether it is saying the right thing. If I felt comfortable performing without any separation, I would totally do it. But I had to start in a place where I had more control of the world that I was trying to create and absorb myself in, so it was as much for me and my performance experience as it was considered from an audience perspective.

Like Keeley, it’s been so much about figuring what I feel comfortable with, what I feel better about. Back then it was like, I don’t want to have to talk. I don’t want to look like me. Hell, I don’t even want to be on the stage, I’ll just be over there. But it’s funny because all that changes and evolves. It has to.

When you came out with Debris, Keeley, I remember you talking about not necessarily having the ability to believe that people would think that you were worth listening to, and that your voice was worth hearing.

KEELEY FORSYTH: I mean, that hasn't really changed [laughs]. But I think I would interpret it more as, when I got to the point of releasing that album after making those songs and singing them to myself for a long, long time, I kind of understood that it didn’t really matter to me. It didn’t matter if people thought I was worth listening to or not, because I wasn’t looking for it. I wasn’t necessarily wanting to be accepted, liked, or listened to.

I do think that’s maybe a reflection of the kind of psychology that I had at that moment. Maybe the reason I vocalised that was because it was kind of like a nice, warm coat to put on. The realisation that I don’t need this. But I guess I was saying that knowing that the coat would probably disappear and I’d have to start again.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think for both of you that these runs of shows are the first time that you’ve properly incorporated film visuals in your performances. Has that changed your mindset at all?

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: Yeah, it's definitely a new experience. I think when I started out I was still very much in the mindset of ‘What’s the least I can turn up with that can make the biggest impact?’ I’ve always said that I was going to be the visuals. But I think, with Black Dog, it’s much more staged. I wanted it to feel much more like a theatre piece, and I think the visuals really help to focus that.

We’re playing with live visual feedback, which is actually a really nice, ghostly, strange thing to incorporate, since so much of Black Dog is about going into the world of ghosts. I think recording and technology is inherently ghostly, and can be subject to all these weird kinds of interference, so it made sense to visualise that. It’s been great to finally do that with my work, and to do it properly. I mean, it takes a while to get to the stage where you have the budget for it, even though what I do is all very minimal still. I love that I can react to it, too. That’s a new element, and I like that it’s taking my mind away from the 2D thought of ‘I’m performing for you,’ and I can kind of be in three or four places at once, which is really, really cool.

I’m really interested to see what Keeley is doing as well. I haven’t seen you live yet, but I was fascinated by the show that you did where you were interacting with all this soil that you had on stage. That looked amazing.

KEELEY FORSYTH: I really did like that. I was trying not to re-enact what Pina Bausch did with The Rite of Spring, but this was for a stage production I did with Ross called Bog Body so I could kind of get away with saying, no, this is needed.

For The Hollow, it’s my first time really using lights and video. I’ve never really engaged with that before because, for me, I like things to not be a spectacle at all. I like things to be really reduced, with only the very basics. This time I am working with Netia Jones, who is an incredible lighting and stage designer and video artist who has worked for places like the English National Opera and the Royal Opera House. I was introduced to her through my manager. I didn’t seek her out. Obviously, you kind of hope to maybe build a little tribe of people who get you, and Netia is one of those people. Her energy is amazing. When we met it was a feeling like, ‘Ah, there you are!’.

So, yeah, for me it’s more than just having these incredible visuals on the screen. It’s also the lighting that she's come up with, and the kind of shadows that it creates.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: That sounds amazing. Thinking back, I think you probably saw the Black Dog show at the least suitable place. The worst setup we had on the tour was at that show. The screen was almost 10 feet above my head, so it didn’t quite work as it was meant to. It probably looked a bit strange to you.

KEELEY FORSYTH: No. I get what you mean, but I loved it.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: Did you hear about the weird thing that happened at that show?

KEELEY FORSYTH: Oh, yeah, I was in the room at the time. I couldn’t believe it. This guy fell off the balcony. There was a moment where he was sitting up after the fall and he put his hand up… I have never seen a finger bent like that. I had something like an out of body experience seeing that. My daughter ended up shouting at me because I was being so overdramatic.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: Oh wow, I had no idea. Shit. Worst nightmare! I was backstage and only heard it through the feed into the green room. We were like, ‘What’s going on? It sounds like someone was really badly injured,’ and the people at the venue were saying, ‘This has never happened before!’

That kind of became our phrase for the tour – 'It’s never happened before' – because for every show there was always something weird that took place, as if the whole tour was cursed.

KEELEY FORSYTH: It was a weird thing to see unfold, but I’d been really looking forward to the show so I just tried to put it out of my head.

When I was thinking of other commonalities in your music, I kept coming back to the idea that place plays quite an important part in it. Obviously, Elizabeth, you've done quite a lot that references England in so many ways, and Black Dog is very much focused on your childhood home and what transpired there. And Keeley, I think you’ve often taken inspiration from whatever environment you’re in. You used to say it was because it was all you had to draw from. So I wondered, how important is place to The Hollow?

KEELEY FORSYTH: I think it is important, but it isn’t necessarily a real place. I think in making any kind of art, you have to kind of place yourself in, and be present in, something. You have to be really detailed within the environment that you’re making work from, but you don’t have to be physically in it. What I call ‘the hollow’ is a real place. It’s this sort of mineshaft place that I came across while out walking. But, yeah, for me in general the place doesn’t have to be real.

Actually, this is a question for Elizabeth. You know, sometimes when you’re making a film, the writer will talk about what it’s about and why they felt the impulse to make a story about that feeling or memory. So I was wondering, with Black Dog, if you were to make it into a film, would you be able to create it scene by scene? Is it a story that you could really trace in that way?

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: Maybe, I don’t even really know. I do think about albums as films, sort of, but I think more in terms of the general mood. I love it when you watch a film and it really affects you. When you’ve been so intimate with the mood and it’s done the job so well that it can take days or weeks or longer to shift out of that feeling, because it’s so absorbing. Always, for me, I think that’s my ultimate goal.

For this album, I was sort of recreating my childhood home in a way that I could sort of get closer to the feeling of being haunted by that house, and to that feeling of being afraid. Then, from that one idea, things kind of grew and ended up crossing over into the now, and what I can do with those feelings now. I wanted to explore the physiological effects of those fears, and to explore how long those experiences of anxiety can go on for. How they shift and grow and loop. I hope that answered your question!

KEELEY FORSYTH: Yeah, that does, and it makes a lot of sense.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: I don’t know about you, but I don’t really remember a lot of what I’m doing when I’m doing it. I often don’t remember the what, the why, or the how, and sometimes it takes other people to tell me, or for them to ask a question that makes me think about things differently.

I do know that I made a lot of connections that I didn’t expect to make. Like starting out with ghosts and then realising that hauntings and possessions, and things like that, have so much more in common with depression and anxiety than I’d really understood before. I think it made me kind of nervous to discover that.

Otherwise it’s just a total freefall into an idea and seeing where that leads, and often the structure comes afterwards, when you’re almost finished with the songs and things have to be shaped and sculpted in a way that can be communicated.

KEELEY FORSYTH: Yeah, I feel the same. It’s a weird thing to have to try and commit to what it is when you’ve made a record. I do really enjoy getting deeper into any subject, and picking at the threads of things, but I do always feel a bit self-indulgent talking about my work like that. Because the reality is that often, as Ben Frost recently said, that you end up kind of making up this narrative of what the record is about.

Of course, it’s a beautiful chance to meet writers and read what they have to say, and all that is really valuable and relevant, and I do love the sharing of creativity. But I do really get what Ben was saying, because sometimes you make up this narrative and say that the work is about that, but in reality the work is only the work. Nothing more or less. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything bigger than that. I find those conversations really interesting.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: Yeah, and I think it just wouldn’t work if doing the work was just about knowing. Like, if you were completely convinced by an idea and knew exactly how it was going to map out, I wonder if it would feel as good as achieving something through chance encounters. I can’t imagine closing myself off to those, and I think maybe the work wouldn’t be as direct as it is when it’s just allowed to flow.

That’s what I get from your music. I feels very realised, minimal and lean. I have such great admiration for your voice, because it needs nothing behind it. It has such an unusual, rich character. And I’m sorry, because it’s probably horrible to hear this, but I think you could just do a full spoken word or completely a cappella record and it would still be amazing.

And this voice, it’s coming from all the strands of your experience. It’s created by, and creates, something in its own universe. That’s not something that you can get from plotting. You either have it or you haven’t.

KEELEY FORSYTH: Thank you, yeah [laughs nervously]. Wow, it’s really hard to talk about that.

ELIZABETH BERNHOLZ: Totally. It’s so hard to talk about a voice and where that comes from. It’s like the dark arts or something. You just can’t explain it.