Gazelle Twin on the connection between ghosts, technology and women’s rights

The final night of my tour for Pastoral culminated in a performance at a cinema in Walthamstow called Mirth, Marvel and Maud. The second I walked into the building, I had this overwhelming sense of a pressure change. I instantly felt anxious and strange. There was a staff member there setting up, so I asked, “Is this place haunted?” and they kind of looked at me a little taken aback.

I was overwhelmed by this feeling. It’s a feeling I’m not unfamiliar with. Throughout the years of making and performing Pastoral, I’d been struggling with postnatal depression from the birth of my first child in 2016, and had recurring dreams about a ghost that would possess me and levitate my body really violently. After that gig in Walthamstow, I was chatting with a friend, Alexander Tucker, a.k.a. Microcorps, who was telling me a ghost story – completely randomly. I realised, with all of these culminating feelings and anxieties and thoughts, that my next album would be something to do with ghosts.

I began researching the technology of ghost-hunting and discovered many connections between the development of audio technology and the spiritualist movement. From there, there’s a whole genetic pathway of music going through people like Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram and the Radiophonic Workshop – those kinds of sounds and machines that have a heritage in something supernatural. Even the women’s rights movement was really influenced by early spiritualism because of the role women played in spiritualism. The movement gave women a platform and power that I really relate to – the power of transfiguration; the ability to freely go into another place, whether that was a spirit world or a recessive place in themselves where they could scream and be crazy. Where else could they have done that in that era?

What ended up coming out [on Black Dog] was an emotional response, an excavation of my own fears and lifelong psychological state. But to make the initial connection between technology, women’s rights and ghosts? It blew my mind.