Cheersquad Records & Tapes are super pleased to bring you ‘Visualiser’, the haunting first single from the debut EP ‘Hell on Bent Street’ by Melbourne musician Georgia Knight, coming out digitally on Friday, June 3rd.

“Quietly seething… Like indie-goth-jazz. I love it.” – Jodi Phillis (The Clouds)

Melbourne’s Georgia Knight has a singular and uninhibited style which sits at a cross-section of genres with influences spanning Sparklehorse, Sandy Denny and Dirty Three. Belying her youth, her music has some of the darkness that’s been synonymous with Melbourne music, since Nick Cave and co held court at St Kilda’s Crystal Ballroom in the late ’70s. Indeed, former Wreckery frontman and original Bad Seed Hugo Race is a recent collaborator. It is a darkness which feels very real. Not for Georgia any tongue-in-cheek dolefulness. Her music may share some of the ramshackle qualities of some of her inner northern contemporaries, but the discord seems more-deep rooted. Her music, guitar-based, and vibrantly electric despite its pared back nature, is elemental with a rootsiness grown from the crumbling bitumen and ageless bluestones of Melbourne’s inner city streets.

Georgia says about Visualiser: “There were a few Pixie’s references flying around when we recorded Visualiser, and I ended up redoing all the vocals through a Leslie (spinning) speaker to trip it out even more. I wrote it about going further into loneliness to take hold of it. When we first started recording it was mostly lyrics and just a couple of chords, and Nick walked in with the bass riff which became the main part of the song. He’d borrowed a p-bass from the guy Murray who owns the building, and liked it so much he ended up convincing him to sell it.”

The video for ‘Visualiser’ was shot at Carlton’s iconic La Mama Courthouse Theatre, and sees Georgia alone, dancing abstractly and cathartically to her own song. Georgia says about the concept she had for the video: “I always really liked poking around backstage in places like that, seeing all the stuff you need to make a fantasy come to life, so the video is based on that. It’s shot in three takes, as a little story about a character who is this kind of scurrying big-headed stagehand. Left to its own devices in the theatre, it totally gives in to delusions of grandeur. Like if the phantom of the opera was never discovered.”

To capture a feeling of urgency and escape, her atmospheric EP, which will come out later this year, was recorded live during a short run of recordings. Inspired by the Dirty Three to go freely where the song goes, the arrangements came together in the studio. The powerful 3-piece of Georgia Knight on guitar and vocals, Nick Finch (Cash Savage and The Last Drinks, Graveyard Train) on bass and Holly Thomas (Freya Josephine Hollick, Quivers) on drums were recorded live by Alex O Gorman at Purple Wayne Studios in Melbourne.

Georgia says of this period: “I was listening to a lot of Dirty Three, Kate Bush and PJ Harvey around then. I love PJ’s record ‘Stories of the City, Stories of the Sea’; it sounds totally conjured up from and for a place. I had started playing her perfect song We Float, in order to get inside it, and it felt so good playing it with Holly and Nick that we put it on the EP.

I tracked a few extra vocals and guitars at Soundpark in Northcote. Around that time I’d also started doing some session work, and Idge from Soundpark got me listening to Sparklehorse, Spencer P Jones and a lot of Lee Hazelwood.”

Knight entered the scene as a teenager, having attended folk festivals with her parents as a kid. She started playing in an indie act and at the iconic Corkman pub sessions whilst studying sculpture at VCA.

After fronting alt-country band The Hot Springs, Georgia Knight began performing solo; songwriting, finding her voice, and performing on other artists recordings and sharing lineups alongside Darron Hanlon, Cash Savage, Ben Salter, Cable Ties, Hugo Race, Maple Glider, Angie McMahon and Blake Scott (Peep Tempel).

“In the same emotively revealing style as Angel Olsen, Bruce Springsteen and Big Thief, Georgia Knight’s disarming howls operate on a higher plane than anything else you’re likely to stumble across.” – Opinion Police