'Lilith' / Interview with Exquisite Corpse
Exquisite Corpse talks choral bangers, sinking into the sea and letting go of inflammation in her debut EP, Lilith.
Exquisite Corpse curls into liberation with a tapestry of sedative strings, synths and drunken vocals that soundtrack the release of universal anxieties in her premier release, Lilith.
Exquisite Corpse is the solo project of Naarm-based singer/songwriter and producer Lily Dee, whose music is largely informed by surrealist and ephemeral meditations on human connection.
Image Credit by Celine Dore & Jack Loel
BIG CONGRATS on your debut EP! Sending lots of love <3 How are you feeling, emotionally and creatively now that ‘Lilith’ is out in the world?
Thank you! I’m sending lots of love back! I’m honestly feeling pretty chill about Lilith. I definitely went through a stage of severe self-doubt about it but I’ve been working on this release for so long now that it’s kind of reached a point of nostalgia. You know when your thoughts and feelings are inside something it feels so important and intense but once you step outside of it and package it up in a little bow, you can feel content and calm about it? Making these 5 tracks was a journey through some inner turmoil of uncertainty, so as lame as it sounds, closing the chapter rings true here and I’m super ready for that. Creatively I’m ready for something new, I really just want to go into some deep patch of nature and make an hour long recording of forest noises.
‘Lilith’ is a mammoth piece of work that deserves tons of deciphering. You’ve said that it’s about “using human connection as a cure for universal feelings of uncertainty and insanity.” Could you unpack this?
This creative project saw me feeling my way through the dark trying to sort through certain thoughts and emotions. ‘Lost’ stems from an explorative introspection with alarm-clock samples and siren synth noises. There is a sense of trying to snap into clarity and focus, and to resist being dragged into the thick mud of murky rumination. This song for me, is a cathartic journey that celebrates the shared experience of uncertainty. The 2nd track ‘Seas’ was a liberation from feelings about the fogginess of youth and the sense of coming-of-age that we all continue to feel as adult “grown ups” (or at least... I’m still feeling it). The lyrics are,
‘Seas cease tides stay the same/Though we're growing older now/Slowly bolder now/Our skin feels thicker than before and/I'm living life like you do yours.’
I guess the reason I’ve likened the whole EP to an exploration of connection and collaboration is to cure feelings like these, so that by the end of making the tracks I realised how important it was that I ask and accept help from others. I’ve learnt that it’s really important to gain outside perspectives and there were so many people who helped and inspired me with their own creativity. Also, it’s fun! It’s so cool to collaborate with other artists! That’s why the moniker Exquisite Corpse fits so well for what I’m trying to do creatively. It’s like a blind collaboration with different artists and I’m keen to do more!
On that, curious as to how this wildly apocalyptic time informs the concept and the instrumental composition of the EP? Insanity has been the stinging emotion of the year!
I’m definitely craving contact (have I been hugged in the last week? Not sure) and I think that helped drive the collaborative component. Everyone I’ve talked to has been reaching out to old friendships and have come to the realisation of how important good, warm, trusting and reciprocal relationships are for us. So reaching out to creative friends was a great excuse for me to connect or reconnect with people. Most of the songs were written well before the pandemic but I isolated at home on the Sunshine Coast in the first lockdown and finding a deserted section of beach to walk each day was an anchoring experience for me. The whirling weightlessness associated with the sea unintentionally came through in the compositions.
Your vocals are completely mesmerising here. It feels like this gush of release of inflammation, and now there’s only softness flooding in. Have you always had this orchestral edge to your singing?
Wow, that is such beautiful feedback (extreme warm fuzzies here!).
I’m hugely influenced by my background in choral singing. I sang for several years in a choir when I first moved to Naarm/Melbourne and toured as a chorister with the New Zealand Baroque Orchestra in 2018 and sang in Nicolas Jaar’s choir at Dark Mofo in 2019. But I spent a lot of time experimenting with different instruments and genres (had a huge folk-phase) before resting in the intersection between acoustic and electronic sounds. I still draw from my roots in classical music and often delve into my Spotify playlist ‘mashthosebangers’, which is 4hrs of choral bangers. There’s something so nice about group singing, and the harmonic cadences that are often a feature in this kind of music. A cadence, for me, is that *sigh* moment at the end of a phrase that makes everything feel like it’s resolved and released. I’m definitely used to hearing musical mechanics like this and it makes me so glad to hear you describe your feelings about listening to ‘Lilith’ with words like, “flooding,” “release,’” and “inflammation.”
Love the range of whirling strings/vocals assembled over such pacifying and hypnotic synth work. Can you speak to this multi-layering of textures and sounds, in the production process?
So glad that it feels “pacifying and hypnotic”. Ableton is the electronic platform I use to mold and distort audio, smacking strokes of sound together and warping them into something that fits, or expresses, what I’m feeling/thinking. I’m not super into the midi function but I think that’s because it’s more unfamiliar to me than recording and manipulating audio. I mainly use my Analogue Synthesizer, electric guitar, voice and then a patchwork of samples. The production process was pretty different for each track but generally what I found, for vox especially, is that I would take ages and absolutely agonise over getting it perfect and then I’d actually prefer the recording I’d taken as a practise run. For me, the less pressure I put on myself to get it perfect, the more I like the product - my mixer/masterer, Robert Downie, probably finds this super frustrating (sorry Bobby!). I also used some amazing samples gifted by Lunga School which included running water noises and some really beautiful violin by a Melbourne violinist.
There’s this deep pull into the formlessness or the magic of the sea that reverberates throughout the EP. You speak of “bathing in the sea” in ‘Seas’, and symphonically ‘Lilith’ is just oceanic. What’s the significance to the water, for you? Very drawn to how you’ve captured the ‘weightlessness’ of the sea and immersed it into the fluidity of your music?
A friend of mine recently described swimming in the ocean as the most enclosed in nature you can be. For me, the sea tells a story of a weightless whirling mess that goes in and out with the tides regardless of what’s going on. It’s a great anchoring feeling. I think growing up by the coast made the ocean a real marker of my youth and recklessness. I really love the saltiness and dirtiness of the beach. Maybe I’ll join the Brighton Icerbergers for a dip next winter...
Tell us about the creative collaborations/link-ups behind this release?
Yes! Definitely! In an exquisite corpse game, each player draws on a piece of paper, folds the page to conceal their design and passes it to the next person to continue. The result is a collaborative creation of art that is both bizarre and intuitive. Lilith is a 5-track release that I've collaborated with a bunch of creatives on. The first single 'Seas' is paired with an animation by Celine Dore which I overlaid with some visuals of the beach on the Sunny Coast I’d shot while I was there. I knew Celine from a workplace and I slid into her dms when I saw some of the amazing animations she was making using MS paint (!!!!). I really didn’t ask her for anything in particular, she contributed what she liked and created what she wanted. What she made for ‘Seas’ is so serene and beautiful! For ‘Lost’ I reached out to an old friend who writes lovely poetry, Bryan Cooper. ‘Mimind’ is paired with a short story by Jack Loel. I reached out to him with this track and originally wanted to make a film clip with subtitles that didn’t match the lyrics. I thought the dissonance of it would be super effective at maddening ‘Mimind’ even more but Jack wrote this really wonderful, relaxing story and I found that having the captions in a video took away from it. 'Mimind Reprise' was released with an art-film by an old colleague, Luke Hadland. Luke likes to use art to explore science and life in the anthropocene and took this footage of an old 'broken' computer screen.
Before we wrap up, can you describe ‘Lilith’ in three words? :-)
Tender ~ Cathartic ~ Collaborative
Stay updated with Exquisite Corpse here. Stream/buy Lilith via Bandcamp here.
Words by Lily Dee. Interview by Lakshmi Krishnan.
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