When OUTinPerth chats to Australian musician Gordi about her new album Like Plasticine, she’s in the middle of a European tour with Foster the People.
Being in a different city almost every night is an experience that the Gordi describes as a “bit of a blur”, but she’s loving playing her new music to audiences every night.
“It’s very chaotic. You definitely get this deep set fatigue in your bones. There’s nothing quite like being in the grueling parts of tour, but at the same time, it’s amazing! You sit in a van all day and then you end up on the streets of Paris. It’s kind of singular experience. It’s not as quite as glamorous as it sounds, but there are some moments which are pretty amazing.”
Gordi, the performance name for Sophie Payten, has already shared two much loved albums. Her debut Reservoir came out in 2017, and in 2020 she followed it up with Our Two Skins. This year a steady stream of singles has come out from her third record Like Plasticine. Each one has had a distinctly different sound, while also been unmistakably Gordi.
When we catch up over a video call, with the record soon to be released, Gordi’s excited that fans will get to explore the whole album.
“It’s been imminent for so long, so I’ve been through phases with it. When we were first starting to roll it out, I was thinking ‘This record’s been in my life for so long. I need to remind myself what it’s about.’
“I think it gives it a new life when it starts coming out, and I see people connecting with it. Then there’s another life again, when I start playing songs live. That allows me to reconnect with the songs at their origin. I am desperate for the record to come out for sure.” Gordi shared.
Gordi said making Like Plasticine was a very different experience from her first two albums.
“My first record was piecemeal. I was starting to tour around the world, and doing songs here and there with different people.
“My second record, we set four weeks aside, we hit the go button and we recorded it in that window of time. I feel like this one happened in chapters.”
“It happened in stages. There was the first stage, which was me carving out some weeks to actually write the songs. In the midst of the pandemic. I’d been really struggling to write anything.
“My whole life I’d found that songwriting was just part of my everyday. Like breathing. It would just start to happen and I would follow the moment. The pandemic really changed that. I was having a lot of existential questions about being a songwriter, and what the role of music was in the face of this epic catastrophe that was happening.
“I had to carve out time to excavate the well of stuff that I had to write about. That was the first part. Then the second part of the process, was taking those songs to work with different collaborators. I tried to curate the different tracks according to who I thought would do a good job on different styles of music that are throughout the record. The final part was me sitting in a room by myself in Melbourne for six months trying to turn it all into a record.”
While many musicians found the period of lockdowns a productive and creative time, Gordi’s experience was different. She returned to her other profession, being a doctor in a hospital at the forefront of the response to pandemic.
“I genuinely think it is like the war for our generation. It’ll be like ‘I was like, in my twenties during the pandemic.’
“For the people in the music industry, for a lot of artists it felt like a cliff face. It felt like all the momentum we’d all been building, it just dropped off into nothing. I remember someone saying to me in the middle of 2020, this friend of mine who works in music, they said ‘It’s not going to feel anything close to normal until 2025 I reckon.’ I was like, ‘That’s crap’. But it’s been entirely true.”
Gordi admits its pretty unusual to have someone who in one part of their life has a job in a creative industry, while simultaneously being something very technical and scientific like medicine. She shares that she has her own fascination with medical professionals who make music, and that she’s made a concerted search in the past.
“I think it’s usually more classical music. I definitely did search far and wide for practicing medical professionals who have had a genuine contemporary music careers. I found two people. One was Deniz Tek from Radio Birdman, and one was another guy who plays bass in the band Bad Dreems, who’s a plastic surgeon.”
When it comes to making new music Gordi shares that she begins by making a playlist of the musical influences that she’s currently enamored with.
“I’ve always got a playlist, anything that’s peaking my interest, I throw in there. Then I try to listen to that non-stop to really fill up my consciousness and my subconsciousness.
“When I’m going into the studio, I’m hoping that listening to that music is informing my decision making. I definitely had some references in mind.
“I think the thing that shaped it most of all were these two separate weeks that I had of writing the record. The first one being in Phoenix Central Park in Sydney where I went in and I had circled myself with some guitars, some synths, some amps, and they had a grand piano there, a couple of little drum machines.
“I would go in each morning and just try to create some sort of atmosphere that I felt was inspiring to me. So often it was hitting a little drum loop and writing a bass line. I would record four bars of that, and then I would just play it on the speakers in the room, I would walk around and try to get in a state of mind where I could then write over the top of that.
“I think the choices I made in the types of instruments I had there, and the types of microphones, and the types of things I was playing, those were all pretty conscious choices.” Gordi said.
As the singles from the album have arrived Gordi’s been taking the record to the world. Alongside her tour with Foster the People, she’s also recently made appearances at Lollapalooza and the Hinterland Festival in the USA, and she also scored a guest appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show.
Soon she’ll be back in Australia for a run of shows, and will also be supporting David Gray when he tours the nation, sharing with us that she can’t wait to be playing in front of Australian audiences.
Like Plasticine ins available now.
Hero image by Brianna da Silva.
