Gazelle Twin

Phone interview by Brenda Bosma
Photos shot by Cat Stevens in Hove, UK

Brighton-based art-rocker Elizabeth Bernholz, aka Gazelle Twin, tears off her skin with the breathtaking and bloody scary album Unflesh. Taking elements from industrial noise and body horror films, deeply personal songs, with titles such as ‘Guts’, ‘Anti Body’ and ‘Belly of the Beast’, are a cathartic trip through a vengeful subsconscious. She talks to us about being tangled up in your own guts, honesty and the Old Testament.

It’s interesting how this record cuts open contemporary culture in a ruthlessly honest and personal way, and at the same time is really good to dance to.

Thank you! I think you can judge music purely on its effect on how much you feel you want to dance to it – at least, I reckon that’s a good measure of it. I just love physical music and wanted this record to trigger a simple physical reaction, which is to really feel that low bass and repetitive beats. I enjoy music like that, so it naturally happened that way.

It’s almost as if that physical part you’re talking about is the euphoric part, while the lyrics are quite disturbing.

The song ‘Exorcise’ is the least negative one on the record. It’s about celebrating the body – a positive thing.

‘I wanted to make it sound like I was recording inside my body, inside the guts where all these certain emotions like nerves, longing and anxiety are settled’

That song is about the body on fire, right?

Absolutely. It’s about sex – so all the good things, from orgasms to fever dreams, and even in that there’s some good stuff, like when you’re on drugs and not necessarily suffering, that too can be quite fun.

Listening to the record makes you feel like you’re tangled up in your own guts. Is that a good thing too?.

Well, that’s what it was for me. It was literally from my belly at one point. I wanted to make it sound like I was recording inside my body, inside the guts where all these certain emotions like nerves, longing and anxiety are settled. For me how these emotions affected me, my mood, that was important to me.

The lyrics are deeply personal. You make yourself quite vulnerable – in spite of the uniform and the mask you wear onstage. Can you tell us a bit about the process from not talking about stuff to not resisting it any more?

For most of my life I was concealing it, which is probably what drove this irrepressible desire to just scream out everything that I’ve come to feel growing up. The songs come from a long period of reflecting on this and understanding how everything shaped you. At some point you can’t be anything but honest. The traumatic aspects of everything in this record, I already went through. That person isn’t me now, but me back then, even though it’s fictionalised and even though memory is in part fictionalised. I sort of imagined that process if I met myself as a child. Once the attachment is there, you’re not that person any more. I wanted to explore what was still lingering. I do feel like I was able to be quite brave and frank about it, but I don’t like to talk too much about it. It can become boring or New Age-y, but there certainly is a therapeutic aspect there, and the interesting thing is, even though it’s so particular to me, it relates to others.

The name Gazelle Twin conjures up a beautiful image. How did that come about?

Its origin is not so exciting, really. It’s an anagram of my birthname with some letters added to it. There were, like, 3,000 combinations and I instantly thought Gazelle Twin conjured a strong image – plus it had a link to the Bible, which I used to love to read as a teenager. The romance of it had a strong appeal to me. In the Old Testament there’s one passage about sex, it’s really kind of wordy, about a woman’s breasts compared with two fawns of a gazelle, so I saw that image again and instantly loved how it makes the project inherently feminine, but at the same time slightly detached and symbolic. Now I don’t really think about the name any more, except when someone says I copied Aphex Twin!

You could easily blame your twin.

It’s a very fortunate name in every way! And having this biblical reference, to me, is a secure way to experience life. That’s why people are drawn to religion, I think, and I am too: it’s a comforting thing.