Georgia Knight – Visualiser: New Song of The Day
Georgia Knight gets your Sunday started with her moody Visualiser.
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Cheersquad Records & Tapes are pleased to bring you “Visualiser”, the haunting first single from the debut EP Hell on Bent Street by Melbourne musician Georgia Knight, out digitally today. The new single comes ahead of Georgia’s appearance at Dark Mofo on Saturday June 11, and her guest appearance on Hugo Race‘s new album Once Upon A Time In Italy.
Georgia Knight has a singular and uninhibited style which sits at a cross section of genre with influences spanning Sparklehorse, Sandy Denny and Dirty Three. Belying her youth, her music has some of the darkness that’s been synonymous with Melbourne music since Nick Cave and co held court at St Kilda’s Crystal Ballroom in the late ’70s; indeed, former Wreckery frontman and original Bad Seed Hugo Race is a recent collaborator. It is a darkness which feels very real – not for Knight any tongue-in-cheek dolefulness. Her music may share some of the ramshackle qualities of some of her inner northern contemporaries, but the discord seems more deep rooted. Her music – guitar-based, and vibrantly electric despite its pared back nature – is elemental and blue-noted, with a rootsiness grown from the crumbling bitumen and ageless bluestones of Melbourne’s inner-city streets.
Georgia says about “Visualiser”: “There were a few Pixies’ references flying around when we recorded Visualiser, and I ended up redoing all the vocals through a Leslie (spinning) speaker to trip it out even more. I wrote it about going further into loneliness to take hold of it. When we first started recording it was mostly lyrics and just a couple of chords, and Nick walked in with the bass riff which became the main part of the song. He’d borrowed a p-bass from the guy Murray who owns the building and liked it so much he ended up convincing him to sell it.”
Georgia also wrote the treatment for the video for “Visualiser”, which was directed and shot by Wildrose Media and filmed at Carlton’s iconic La Mama Courthouse Theatre, and sees Knight alone, dancing abstractly and cathartically to her own song. She says: “I always really liked poking around backstage in places like that, seeing all the stuff you need to make a fantasy come to life, so the video is based on that. It’s shot in three takes, as a little story about a character who is this kind of scurrying big-headed stagehand. Left to its own devices in the theatre, it totally gives in to delusions of grandeur. Like if the phantom of the opera was never discovered.”
Knight’s new recordings were recorded live by Alex O Gorman at Purple Wayne Studios in Melbourne. It features a 3-piece band comprising Georgia together with Nick Finch (Cash Savage and The Last Drinks, Graveyard Train) on bass and Holly Thomas (Freya Josephine Hollick, Quivers) on drums.
Knight says of the recordings: “I wanted to make a short run of recordings that captured a feeling of urgency and escape, so we tracked everything quickly. The arrangements of the songs were invented in the studio, a lot of it made up as we went along which I learned from Dirty Three; about going freely where the song goes.
“I was listening to a lot of Dirty Three, Kate Bush and PJ Harvey around then. I love PJ’s record Stories of the City, Stories of the Sea; it sounds totally conjured up from and for a place. I had started playing her song “We Float” (a perfect song) in order to get inside it, and it felt so good playing it with Holly and Nick that we put it on the EP.
“I also tracked a few extra vocals and guitars at Soundpark in Northcote. Around that time, I’d started doing some session work, and Idge from Soundpark got me listening to Sparklehorse, Spencer P Jones and a lot of Lee Hazelwood.”
Georgia Knight entered the scene as a teenager, having attended folk festivals with her parents as a kid. She started playing out doing the traditional thing at the iconic Corkman pub sessions whilst studying sculpture at VCA. After fronting alt-country band The Hot Springs, she began performing and writing solo, and performing on other artists recordings and sharing line-ups alongside Darron Hanlon, Cash Savage, Ben Salter, Cable Ties, Hugo Race, Maple Glider, Angie McMahon, and Blake Scott (Peep Tempel). Her current is a trio of herself, Holly Thomas (Freya Hollick, Wagons) and Nick Finch (Graveyard Train, Cash Savage & The Last Drinks).
“In the same emotively revealing style as Angel Olsen, Bruce Springsteen and Big Thief, Georgia Knight’s disarming howls operate on a higher plane than anything else you’re likely to stumble across.” – Opinion Police
“Quietly seething… Like indie-goth-jazz. I love it.” – Jodi Phillis (The Clouds)
https://cheersquadrecordstapes.bandcamp.com/track/visualiser
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