5 THINGS - PIKELET’S NEW FLAVOUR
Published: Music Australia Guide #73, February 2010.
Known for her looped, multi-instrumental solo work, prodigious Melbourne pop talent Pikelet (aka Evelyn Morris) has released an album of expansive full-band recordings. By Dan Rule
1. Years of touring solo afforded Morris the piece of mind to work with a band.
“I find touring by myself really healthy. I’ve had to learn to not worry too much about the fuck-ups or the shows that don’t go so well, and that’s how I became capable of giving my songs to other people and not being so precious. It’s taken all that time of going solo to figure out how to be in a band.”
2. Morris is fascinated by the malleability of creative process.
“Song-writing can kind of be like religion or science. Religion is where you have an end result and you have to write backwards from that, because the answers are there. With science, on the other hand, you have no idea what’s going to go on and you’re just enquiring and enquiring and enquiring and getting answers as you go along.”
3. New record Stem may have risen from a more conventional band set-up, but Morris insured it was more challenging than ever.
“I was a little bit self-conscious about the fact that I might just get a band and then start writing really straight-up pop songs. I’m really interested in walking that fine line between pop and experimental music. I definitely wanted to lull people into a false sense of security, then throw something weird at them.”
4. Morris’s lyrics have assumed an introspective, almost philosophical, quality.
“Death is a bit of a recurring theme for me. I’m fascinated by it. A lot of my songs kind of work as responses to religion. There are so many songs about going to heaven and believing in stuff like that, so I’m interested in what I can write about in place of that, because I don’t believe in that stuff.”
5. One of her songs takes an anthropological bent, invoking the image of an endurance hunter, stalking his prey.
“Endurance hunters are these people who chase their prey until the prey is exhausted. When they eventually catch the animal, they have a ceremony in which they free the animal’s spirit before taking it home to feed their family. All the parts of the song represent different parts of the chase.”
Stem is available via Love & Mercy/Shock
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