“She said that she watched him die on FaceTime” That poignant line – from track 10 “PVC Divide” – comes from Sophie Payten’s (aka Gordi) first hand observation working in hospitals during the pandemic. As she clocked on for a shift, a deceased patient’s family waited in the fluorescent corridor. Families weren’t allowed to visit during lockout periods, and so had to endure a cold, digital farewell; decades of memories, love, regrets, distilled to pixel. As a final year medical student, Payten learned to certify death. Beyond just what we see in the movies – checking for a pulse, hearing the monotone of a flatline, announcing the time – the process involves observing a person who’s no longer responding. As she looked at their still, waxy skin, Payten says “It made me think of plasticine – that soft, malleable substance, that we can shape and mould in our hands, until we leave it to set in place. I thought about all the ways we are like plasticine in life – how forces we can’t control, contort us into shapes, stretch us thin, and test our resilience. But sometimes, heart-wrenching change can be a thing of beauty.” “Being surrounded by death made me think about how beautiful life is.” But in anguish, there is the ecstasy of change. Though polar opposites of the spectrum, they are connected nonetheless. Where eulogy is euphoria. These moments of transition are captured on her new album, ‘Like Plasticine’, which opens with the gritty, entirely iPhone recorded GD (Goddamn), a reminder of the things we do to carry on and endure – Look around. Slow down. Call your mum. Over sparse, distorted synths, Payten sounds like she’s trapped underwater or pressed against a window, looking in on the lives she is wondering how to step back into. Writing the album was a process of intense excavation. Payten took herself to Sydney for a pair of week-long residencies six months apart – first at Phoenix Central Park and the other at a church, both operated by arts patron Judith Nielson. “I think that whole first week I felt like an exposed nerve, because I was facing everything I’d been really actively not thinking about for a long time. I was like, alright, it’s time. I’m ready for it to explode.” Inside the vault, along with the tender, cerebral pop that’s become a Gordi trademark, a surprising amount of joy sprang out. She’d written Peripheral Lover in Nashville a little while earlier, imagining she might give the song to another artist. It was so celebratory and effusive, she says, “it just really didn’t feel like me on the last record”. But time changed that, and the pop anthem, one that blends yearning, sensitive lyrics with a contagious synth beat, positions Payten alongside Robyn, Róisín Murphy and other masters of the craft. “Peripheral Lover feels like a beautiful exploration of that early part of coming out where you’re in a relationship but you’re not ready to take it public or let people know.” The thing no one tells you about coming out, Sophie Payten has learned, is that after you disturb the soil and dig up the truth of who you are, more morsels of veracity just keep sprouting in their place, begging to be examined and classified. Her second record as electronic pop artist Gordi, ‘Our Two Skins’, chronicled her experience of coming out in her mid-20s and reckoned with identity, family and a shifting future. Emerging from that state of spiked adrenaline and constant, thrumming grief was as euphoric as it was anguishing. “Coming out is awful and beautiful at the same time. I was letting go of a lot of ideas that I had about what my life might look like. It was a real recalibrating of like, ‘Okay, am I going to have kids? Am I going to get married? Where am I going to live? What do I really want in life?’ And that’s why I think that time is incredible: because a lot of people go through their lives and never have that reckoning where they have to rebuild. But if you have to go right to the depths, then maybe you get to resurface more fully.” Payten’s lyrics in Your Consolation Prize grapple with the reality that, for all the acceptance and closeness she’s found since coming out, there will always be young queer people whose lives will have qualifications or asterisks hanging over them because they didn’t fit neatly into the mould. The track recalls the best of synth-pop savants The Postal Service – and, over drum machines backed by a soft choir of voices, represents Gordi at her full power. Those factors converge on Lunch at Dune, a standout on the record that unites Gordi and SOAK, the Northern Irish folk artist born Bridie Monds-Watson. At an Airbnb in London in early 2020, “the whole world was burning down” and so too was Payten’s interior life. “Everything at that time just felt like an insurmountable obstacle, and the only way through it was to get some perspective.” Payten had been a fan of SOAK for some time, and after seeing them perform in New York, knew they’d provide the missing piece Lunch at Dune needed. I know the pressure you feel seems relentless / But everything is fleeting / Except you and I. It’s a gift of a song, and the artists’ voices wrap around one another in a sonic world that builds and grows, rises up and spreads out like a protective forcefield around only those who matter. They sound both wounded and healing at once, lost and certain. There’s a grief that’s woven into the future-focussed act of reexamining and rebuilding. While embracing a new part of herself, Payten was also mourning a specific idea she had to let go of, every day as she clocked in to work as a doctor in regional hospitals during the pandemic. Two songs on the record are inspired by one patient she cared for there. While in rehab following the removal of a brain tumour, he had a new scan that revealed an aggressive return. “He’d been getting better, and the plan for him was to go home and move on with his life. And then it turned out he had five new tumours in his brain. That was the end for him. And I had to tell him that without his family there.” Because of the pandemic, the usual process – “You go in and you’re the bearer of the most horrific news they’ve ever heard, but then you walk out and you leave the next job to their loved ones.” – was impossible. They were on speakerphone and Payten was there, absorbing all the grief in the room. She’d developed a sweet bond with her patient, who received the news simply: “It was written for me.” Anaïs Mitchell, the revered folk singer-songwriter and writer of the Tony award-winning Broadway musical ‘Hadestown’, contributes guest vocals to PVC Divide, a sonic snapshot of her experience in hospitals during the pandemic. Halfway through, its gentle piano score is joined by a percussion loop, as Payten’s vocals echo the conversation she had with her patient. “Went to his room / I told him the news He said he didn’t mind / I’m used to it / Is it bad? Yeah it’s bad How long? How long? How long? How long? I was wrong How long? It was written for me” Payten’s professional lives are split in an almost perverse way, between a healthcare professional who needs to shut off the emotional valve and the songwriter whose job it is to flood the room. What better way to interrogate that contradiction than in a song? “Automatic is about having to just completely quash your emotional response so that you can just be this deliverer and receiver of news. I can’t walk in and be the one that’s crying when I’m telling the person what’s happening to them.” The album’s fractured opener GD (Goddamn) is followed by the swirling, sparsely arranged ‘Alien Cowboy’, an at once cathartic yet dramatic piece of pop music; a mural of a tortured fantasy. With a chorus that opens “Won’t you blow up my universe, so that I can realise we’ve been here the whole time”, this wonderfully written and arranged song conveys a floating anti-gravitational energy equally as much as it acts as a magnetic force propelling towards danger and destruction. The result is a transcendental almost supernatural piece of music with layers of sardonic lyrics filtering throughout: “Join the excommunicated, it’s your birthday celebrate it”. She speaks about the song, “I was thinking about what a gay utopia would look like. Fabricating an imaginary place where, as queer people, you could feel wholly accepted.” Payten has learned the hard way of the need to be malleable, to form and reform in response to her environment and circumstances and self. The pandemic – a moment where we all lost control of our reliable structures and were instead completely shaped by our surroundings – prompted Payten to think about “What are the moments where you really transform in your life? I think grief is one of those things. Love is one of those things. Queerness is one of those things. And so is going into the next act of life.” “I’ve been feeling the rub of entering what Jane Fonda calls “the second act” of life,” she laughs. Friends have babies. People’s lives – and their places in yours – change slowly, but distance makes it all feel sudden and intense. One day you look around and have to figure out who is still important in your life.” Cutting Room Floor is a song about sorting the wheat from the emotional chaff and shedding relationships that barely served a past version of yourself. It was one of the tracks written in that first week at the “Guggenheim-esque” Phoenix space, where Payten made her makeshift studio, surrounded by a circle of instruments “So I was trapped and I couldn’t get out until I had written a song.” The ritualistic routine “was a really intense experience and also had an effect on the way the music was written because I was just there on my own”. She’d spend each morning building a couple of loops, play them on repeat in the space and begin writing over the top. “There was something quite static about those loops, and so each part that was added on top of those, I wanted to feel really human – mistakes and all. On the first page of my notebook – where all the songs from this record are written – I wrote in the top corner “inject emotion into everything”. It was about making the music as undaunted as the stories within it.” Presented by Songbyrd. This is an all ages event