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room. Unlike a lot of recording studios, it has
a lot of natural light – they’re often dark and
dank and they’re filled with smelly men most
of the time,” she laughs. “There’s a bunch of
pianos in there, and I would’ve done upwards
of five takes that we included in the song from
different pianos. But particularly the grand piano.
I started building it layer by layer.”
The murmuring effect she created using a
“little machine called an OP1”, into which you
can record and then sprinkle the pieces. “I
said ‘heaven I know, heaven I know’ into the
microphone and then I split it up breath by
breath, and displayed little parts as the song
went along, which made a kind of idiosyncratic
tapestry,” she explains.
Payten also played around with effects while
recording the excellent Bitter End in Reykjavik
(Iceland); the vocals sound like her voice is
being fed like spaghetti through a leslie speaker.
“I was singing through a really basic mic! We
put it through a guitar amp, then we recorded
it from the guitar amp with a really beautiful
microphone,” she says. “I just stood in the back
corner, as if I was beat boxing, with my hands
over the microphone, singing. We did
hours of that. I loved that sound so
much, I borrowed it for a lot of other
songs on the record. All the little vocal
loops you hear in the background… it
became a really nice texture that’s in a
lot of places on the record, to try and
link it all together. It gives a bit of a
haunting vibe and it really takes me back
to the Icelandic winter landscape.” ZKR
028 SEPTEMBER 2017
visit MUSIC NEWS
GORDI
Most of us are subjected to our parents’
sometimes questionable music tastes
during our formative years, and as we get older
we either embrace those embarrassments
or denounce them as godawful. For Sophie
Payten, the gauche-for-some Aled Jones served
as a link between her tranquil kidlet days and
her adolescence. “My mum had the CD, and
it had You Raise Me Up and other, y'know,
classic hits,” she says of the famous Welsh
choirboy’s record. “When I went away [from
Canowindra, NSW] to boarding school [in
Sydney], my first ever intro to performing was
at an Eisteddfod. My mum was a piano teacher,
so she accompanied me and I sang You Raise
Me Up . I sang it before it was a big hit, I knew
it before it really hit the charts,” she laughs. “It’s
just beautiful, it’s very soothing. So when I was
in boarding school, I was sleeping in a dormitory
with 26 other girls and there were so many
noises that I couldn’t sleep. I had a Discman,
and I had this groovy little case that I could clip
onto the end of my bed. I’d put one earphone in
every night and it would kind of lull me to sleep.
It takes me back to being that little 12-year-old,
and going to the big smoke for the first time,
and trying to settle down to sleep without my
parents in the house. It holds a special place
for me.”
That boarding school experience ended up
shaping the way Payten would write songs,
as she transformed into her moniker Gordi.
She believes that “writing about platonic
relationships can be a great deal more powerful
than writing about romantic ones”; it’s definitely
true that friendships can be amazing in their
complexity, when you think about the longevity
of them. “You’re with these people 24 hours
a day, seven days a week, for six years,” the
musician says. “It’s such an intense experience.
Those people become your family pretty quickly,
and they watch you grow up so intimately, and
they’re going through the same things as well.
It’s a really unique experience. Now I’m 24. I’m
going through that period of figuring out who’s
going to stay in my life for the long term. I find
that really affects me – I’ve been struck by how
tragic it can be when you just drift apart, with
life taking you in different directions, and you’re
watching it happen and there’s nothing you can
really do about it because you’ve got to live your
own life.”
She mentions the track Heaven I Know as a
song which particularly embodies this idea; it’s
a gorgeous piano-led lament which contains
the line “I got older and we got tired,
heaven I know that we tried”, with
electronically-warped whispers and
murmurs across its simple chords,
gradually building into a glittering
conclusion. Payten recorded it at
Turning Studios in Sydney’s Surrey
Hills, a place she found very inspiring.
“It’s a beautiful spot; it has this lovely
window that looks out of the control
Sophie Payten, AKA Gordi,
has just released her debut
album Reservoir.The former
smalltown girl explained the
story behind its devastatingly
lovely, folktronica sound.
INTERVIEW
Reservoir
by Gordi is
out now via
Liberation.
I’m going through that
period of figuring out who’s
going to stay in my life for
the long term
continued