BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
As I prepared for this interview, a bushfire raged across the north west of lutruwita/Tasmania. At 99 hectares, the Tullah flames served as an unwelcome reminder of the harsh Australian summers we’ve experienced, and an unwelcome glimpse into our future.
These ideas of mourning lost wilderness, and looking into a climate apocalypse, fall at the centre of The Quoll. It’s an album, a music video, a series of artworks, and an improvisational performance — all united through the story of a landscape ruled by fire and lichen. Needless to say, humans do not exist there, though a new type of creature does.
In this interview, violinist Natalya Bing and artist-guitarist Joshua Santospirito — the creative minds behind The Quoll — talk us through the unsettling narrative of their debut album; their “strange elegy to the end of the world” set in lutruwita/Tasmania.
Natalya and Joshua, thanks so much for the chat. Tell us, what is the story of The Quoll?
NATALYA: The quoll is represented in half-human female form. She mournfully wanders through the highlands of a future lutruwita, which has been transformed by fire. Her demeanour is weary and resentful.
I actually had a recent rare encounter with a quoll whilst bushwalking. It shared this similar strange look of weariness and resignation to the fact that its environment had been interrupted by me.
JOSHUA: The characters in the quoll story are an invented archetype, or forgotten gods of some sort. I had this idea that they were the last remaining fragments of memories that the earth had of mammals. After the climate apocalypse, eventually Earth will forget that we ever existed.
Right now, we are experiencing a hot Australian summer; in your story, the landscape is ruled by fire. How much of The Quoll was influenced by your relationship to the environment?
J: I wanted to remove humans from the earth’s story. Taking us out of the centre of the story helps us consider the landscape in a different way, perhaps from the point of view of non-humans or Earth itself.
Like most Australians, I think a lot about fires. The new phenomena of dry-lightning strikes that started hitting the Tasmanian landmass in the summer of 2019/2020 was quite terrifying. The huge fires near the Gordon River burnt [a large amount] of the Tasmanian landmass.
I walked to Lake Rhona in early 2021 through a vast area of burnt-out forests, and this influenced the world in which the paintings [in The Quoll] were situated; a deep future which was inhabited by lichens and fire.
These paintings formed the basis of the live performance we recorded for the album of The Quoll.
I’m interested in this icon you have created — a human with a quoll’s head. Throughout your videos, we also start to see other humans with native animal heads. How did you come up with this design and what does it symbolise?
J: The simplicity of the character’s form — black-and-white triangular head with spots — came about in my sketchbooks as I was on an arts residency in Queenstown in 2020. The first time I drew her, I knew she was something special and strange.
These ghostlike characters are some sort of a cipher through which we can try to grapple with the full meaning of a climate apocalypse by looking back in time, and from a non-human viewpoint.
Why did you choose to combine visual art and improvisation to tell this story? And how does each artform share a different side of The Quoll?
N: When Mona Foma got us on board to perform their 2021 festival, we thought it would be a good opportunity to create something grand, bigger than the sum of its parts. So we decided to weave in Josh’s visuals and the largest pipe organ in Tasmania [at St David’s Cathedral]. The visuals helped provide us and the audience with the context, story, and structure that informed our improvisations.
J: Even prior to performing The Quoll, I’ve felt that our music conjures up cinematic landscapes. So it felt quite natural to match the ambition of the sound by creating an ambitious audiovisual performance. Placing it in a cathedral also gave it the gravitas and reverence that the story demanded; to become an elegy, a mourning and celebration of a lost environment.
Let’s talk more about the improvisation. Despite the differences in your musical backgrounds, when you improvise together, it sounds like you were made for each other as artists. How did you discover your chemistry?
N: The first time we ever played together was pretty impromptu. We had a 10-minute jam in the house, and then went outside to a backyard concert and performed in a shed. There was a natural receptivity and flow to our musical ideas, despite coming from very different styles.
We don’t actually know what is behind the magic, and that is sometimes disconcerting because our performances are always a surprise to us. We don’t know what is going to happen or what it’s going to sound like.
A friend who is obsessed with the Myers-Briggs personality tests reckons it’s because of our personality compatibility.
J: There are plenty of precedents, but it is still quite unusual to combine experimental musicians and classical musicians. I love analysing things like this, but have reluctantly agreed in discussions with Natalya to actively avoid articulating what it is that works about combining our musical voices. So it remains mysterious to me, and almost like we’re embarking on a strange, exciting adventure every time we play.
Natalya, you are classically trained, and you have undertaken research in violin improvisation. What does this background bring to your style of musical storytelling here?
N: I did my research on developing improvisational practice techniques for 18th-Century cadenzas. Improvisation is a bit of a lost art now in the classical realm, but it sits at the nexus between composer and performer, which most of the ‘great’ composers were.
I have always loved improvising and jamming, much more than studying already-written pieces. One aspect of this is due to the freedom of being influenced by and responding to the mood of a space and audience. I’m certainly influenced by classical harmony, melodic devices, and gestures — but I mainly let my imagination and ‘affect’ rule when responding to story.
Within this context, I’d like to hear from each of you on this: How do you personally ‘hear’ the story of The Quoll?
J: Although our roles are not formalised, and we switch regularly throughout performances, I would say that I create textures and drones that form a bed that Natalya’s melody and harmonic improvisations float over.
The guitar lends itself to percussive, heart-beat drones that help heighten the story, as there is an overarching sadness in The Quoll. The final sequences featuring the dragon-like throb of the pipe organ — which was played by wonderful Randal Muir — are quite ecstatic, as The Quoll passes through fire and is some of the most exciting music I’ve been part of.
N: Josh’s experimental style of playing pushes me out toward the edges of my own developed sound-world.
The story reflects a poignant sense of isolation and dismay in our current climate, that resulted musically in a more restrained palette than we usually play with. I think our juxtaposed aesthetics and musical backgrounds help create a compelling atmosphere that conveys the beauty and doom in the story.
As you’ve just received your LPs, and are also preparing to share The Quoll through an online release, what message do you hope will resonate with your future listeners?
J: There are just so many speculative stories presently about climate apocalypse currently, it could even be the storytelling zeitgeist of this present moment. So it’s natural to be overwhelmed by the messaging in our culture. I hope this piece doesn’t offer anything more than a mood in which we can feel our way in these mucky emotions.
Also, I hope people will celebrate the humble quoll more in popular culture.
N: Yes, the message that we as humans and our world are evolving at a disorienting rate, and that we should do all we can to help steer it towards a healthier path.
The story of the quoll, told from a futuristic vantage point, allows for retrospective reflection of the precious time we each have on this planet.
Natalya Bing and Joshua Santospirito’s album The Quoll (Scratch Match Records) is released on LP and digital on 9 February. A video of the event Live at St David’s (Mona Foma 2021) will premiere the same day.
Ink drawings from the album will be exhibited at Penny Contemporary from 4-21 February, and watercolour paintings from the album at Cradle Mountain’s Wilderness Gallery from July-October.
Tour dates to be announced.
Keep up to date on Bandcamp, where you can also watch a video of The Quoll.
Images supplied. Natalya and Joshua performance photographs captured by Jacob Collings. Album artwork by Joshua Santospirito.
