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ITW : Corin explores the depths of sci-fi

mana

Every year, Station Gare des Mines brings curious audiences together for a weekend for the Station Électronique festival. From September 8 to 9, you'll have the chance to discover a roster of artists who imagine sound reverberating differently in the club. Listening and movement combine for a unique experience that explores the broad spectrum of electronic music. This year, Australian artist Corin will be presenting her latest project 'Lux Aeterna', before heading off to Berlin Atonal. For the occasion, we caught up with her to discuss her background, and the importance of symbolism in her work.



mana : Coming from Australia, could you tell us more about the music scene there and why you think most of your gigs are booked in Europe?


Corin : I've been predominantly based in between Melbourne and Sydney – both very different cities, but are places that have a really nice local community of artists that I've become acquainted with. I have a lot of people that I collaborate with, especially in the performing arts world. Australia does have a pretty huge music scene, but in terms of the kind of music I make, which is more experimental electronic music, I do find that it's still quite limited in terms of opportunities to perform.

I think there’s more niche communities of electronic music across Europe, whereas in Australia it does exist, but it's on a much smaller scale. It doesn't mean that the talent doesn't exist here, just that there aren’t as many opportunities to perform. I think things are changing though and nowadays, there's a lot of interesting community driven events.


Focusing back on your work, I saw that you have a background in theatre and in sound design. How does performance and art find itself in your work?


I started my solo project back in 2015 and have also been working as a composer in the performance art world. I work with two incredible performance artists in Sydney. One is Justin Shoulder who has a Filipino background like myself and works with incredible inflatable costumes and sets. I've composed a lot of the music for his club shows and theater works, and that was kind of one of my first entry points into that world. The other artist I work with is Angela Goh, who has a contemporary dance background. We've worked on a couple of performance works together, including a dance work that was presented at Sydney Opera House in 2021. For a lot of these performances, I’ve created multichannel compositions, mainly for black box type theatre spaces.


My entry into the performance art theatre world as a composer kind of came about serendipitously. I'd never written music in that context before, so it was a new ground for me, and I was sort of figuring things out on the go. In the process, I feel like I've built up a language in terms of composing music for movement and designing sound for particular spaces.


I’ve really enjoyed the collaborative process of working with artists that don't come from a music background because for me, it's really interesting and sometimes challenging to interpret and translate their ideas into sonic form.


You're talking about creating sound for movements and particular spaces, and I feel like that's something you're doing also in ‘Lux Aeterna’when you're talking about gravity and being light. How were these elements important for this album?


At the time that I was composing the music for Angela Goh’s dance performance piece ‘Sky Blue Mythic’ we were both talking about the idea of movement having its own sentience. I wanted to apply a similar idea to music and play with this idea of sound itself having some sort of outer dimensional quality to it: playing with sounds within physical spaces.

I was experimenting in a surround sound format, eight channels. We had some speakers on the ground and the ceiling, and I was playing around with the sound so that it felt like it was moving vertically up and down in the space. It was a combination of moving the sound around spatially, but also applying certain effects to it. In that process, I started to think about that idea of gravity in sound and trying to create this effect where it feels like it's moving in some sort of interdimensional way.



In the music video of ‘Lux Aeterna’ there also seems to be this idea of modification, in respect to virtual arts, computer graphics, gaming, etc.


Tristan Jalleh is a really visual artist and has created all of my visual animations and live shows since 2017. I think it's probably the longest collaboration I've had and in the process both of our styles have really changed. ‘Lux Aeterna’ was probably the first release where I was quite specific with what I wanted in terms of communicating the sonic ideas into visual form. There was quite a lot of moodboarding and discussion of ideas. Two things were made: the live show and the music video, which just premiered on Fact Magazine.

The idea for the music video was formed back in 2020 when we were in lockdown and there was a lot of interest in creating virtual clubs and online performances. I was interested in creating a performance video that communicated my performance style, but took it to a virtual fantasy level. Tristan and I were interested in exploring visual FX used in early sci-fi films – this old school style of merging realistic looking props with animations. I also have a theater background and have always been surrounded by artists like Justin Shoulder who work with real tangible sculptures and are driven by craft making. So we decided to create a music video that was centred around a hybrid musical instrument that is a combination of a real keyboard prop that I built from the remnants of an abandoned piano merged with a virtual instrument


There are fragments of piano in this album. How important are electroacoustic instruments in your work?


There are mostly samples in this album, although there are some live piano improvisations. They were actually recorded at an amazing gallery performance space in Sydney called Phoenix Central Park. Visually, I love that building because it reminds me of the movie ‘Gattaca’. The piano I performed on is one of the most celestial looking pianos I've ever seen. During that experience, I realised that the architecture of spaces that I perform in can really influence the type of music I make.


Going back to the idea of space, I think there's an idea of eternity in your album. You talked about things being very celestial. What is your ideal visual world, and what do you draw inspiration from?


I guess the character that we created for the video is derived from Mary Immaculate iconography. I worked with a really amazing costume team that I collaborate with in the theater world (Justin Shoulder, Anthony Aitch and Willow Darling). When Justin was designing it, he wanted it to have the appearance of shells or sort of look like scarification. It was in part influenced by themes from Filipino mythology because we both have that shared heritage. The headpiece designed by Anthony Aitch is this beautiful halo that intersects my face in this really weird way so that it almost looks like rings around Saturn.


I'm not a deeply religious person, but I do find beauty in Mary Immaculate. I love the ethereal quality to that image, but then there's also something quite threatening about it. There's a spherical globe that she stands on with serpents around her feet. It's got this demonic quality to it too. My mom was devoutly Catholic: I remember seeing her Mary statues and thinking that is actually quite an odd dichotomy.




A spiritual dichotomy that clashes with sci-fi imagery you seem to draw from!

Yeah, definitely. I wanted to give it a different spin. So I told the costume makers that I wanted it to have this ‘mother of technology’ spin to it. I don't know if you've ever watched, like, ‘Raised by Wolves’, but it’s very inspired by the main character


I’d like to go back to the aspect of light, in terms of reception. I feel like experimental music is still misunderstood, still received as something that's quite dark. Through your video and also your album, you bring light on this. You make it feel more atmospheric, less heavy, something that floats. What's your perspective on this?


Thanks, that does actually speak to things I've thought about in terms of constructing a live performance. When I build my performances, I concentrate on creating some sort of dynamic variation. For me, it is the balancing out of lightness with darkness. I'm always thinking about how to create this sort of tension and release in my new live show. It does have moments where it does get quite dark, but there are always moment of release into something lighter. I think that without both the lightness and darkness, you don't even notice the two.


I think I was also pointing at the reception of experimental music and how it's entering new realms. Audiences seem a bit more open-minded to receiving something more complex. And then when it enters like the concert hall or like the club, then people are going to have, I think this is my perspective, but they will want something more entertaining in a way. And just experimental music is not fulfilling that. It's more like people will think it's like sound art, and I don't know how I can explain it.


I think there's electronic music that exists for self gratification – those ecstatic experiences that you have when you're dancing to an amazing DJ set in a club. I think that's really great, and I respect people that give that kind of performance. But then I think there's also room in the world to have performances with a bit more variation. I was supporting Oneohtrix Point Never at Illuminate in Australia, and it was really inspiring to watch him perform because he would go in and out of different moods and genres: one moment, the set would peak at this euphoric trance level, but then he would completely pull it back and diverge into some other direction. I love that type of performance because it keeps people on their toes.


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You can follow Corin here.


Tickets for Station Electronique are available here.


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