Composer, producer, and visual artist Elizabeth Bernholz – aka Gazelle Twin – today shares a new EP, Black Dog Live, out now via Invada Records. The new EP features four tracks recorded live at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Brighton on the Black Dog tour, and comes accompanied by two evocative performances from the ACCA show.
Bernholz explains, “Our performance at ACCA to a warm and welcoming audience felt significant in the journey of this album and tour. Strange coincidences and happenings also occurred during the making period in the space, which is on the site of the University of Sussex, that I attended some 18 years prior. These loops, cycles and ghostly encounters are a deeply embedded theme in the album, and so I feel extremely grateful to be able to release these songs.”
A unique Black Dog performance has just been announced for the British Library, London on 1 November. Taking place at the grand entrance hall of the Grade I British Library, one of the largest libraries in the world, Black Dog will be reworked by Gazelle Twin and Max de Wardener with the London Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Robert Ames (their second collaboration after working together on The Power and the Glory with the BBC Concert Orchestra in 2022). The specially commissioned performance opens the British Library’s new season, Tales of the Weird: An Autumnal Festival, a celebration of strange, uncanny and horror, and attendees for the event will be able to see the new British Library exhibition, Medieval Women: in their own words included in the event ticket. Arrive early to meet these women from another time, through rare manuscripts, letters and records. The Black Dog tour, which recently saw Gazelle Twin play Rewire, Donau and Simple Things festivals, continues on 30 August with an appearance at Supersonic Festival in Birmingham.
The new EP features tracks from Gazelle Twin’s fourth studio album, the acclaimed Black Dog (2023), an album about confronting fear – supernatural, collective, and personal. Across the EP four new versions of ‘Two Worlds’, ‘Fear Keeps Us Alive’, ‘A Door Opens’ and ‘Unstoppable Force’ present the audience with a raw, visceral take on the original and two videos from the ACCA in Brighton illustrate the unique world this remarkable artist conjures.
Watch live films for two very different sides to the album: the fierce and uncompromising anger of ‘Unstoppable Force’, and the hopeful heart bursting ballad, ‘A Door Opens’, both featuring visuals by Dan Conway.
“The stage set for Gazelle Twin reveals a scene that could almost suggest cosy. An old velvet armchair and fringe-shaded standard lamp stage left, the large bohemian rug in the centre, a stool, an angle poise and upright reel-to-reel tape recorder to the right, home movies and a quiet night in for Elizabeth Bernholz maybe? What follows is more like stark exposure and sonic intensity both toxic and intoxicating.” – Brighton Source review of the ACCA
Later this month, Factory International will present Robin/Red/Breast, at Aviva Studios, Manchester. The production – featuring music by Gazelle Twin – has been co-created by Maxine Peake, Sarah Frankcom and Imogen Knight, in collaboration with Daisy Johnson and Gazelle Twin, and is a chilling new retelling of John Bowen’s cult TV play Robin Redbreast, often cited as the precursor to The Wicker Man. Gazelle Twin and Maxine Peake recently collaborated on an audio installation We Wax. We Shall Not Wane, commissioned by Somerset House, London, for The Horror Show Exhibition in 2022.
Later this year, the British horror film, Saint Maud - written by Jessica Andrews (Saltwater, Milk Teeth) - adapted for stage with music by Gazelle Twin, will open at the Live theatre in Newcastle upon Tyne.
