Ela Stiles

The a cappella debut album from Ela Stiles (Songs, Bushwalking) is a strange bird, writes ANNIE TOLLER, skipping at first from track to track, then meditating at length on a single idea.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] One midafternoon in April, a couple of weeks before the release of her debut solo album, Ela Stiles took the stage at a pub in Fitzroy. The kind of place that still plays host to hip-hop jazz bands and ‘alternative rock’, it’s a relic of the early 2000s, when kids were more than happy to drink Carlton Draught and the ‘vintage’ era was going through its death rattle. A small crowd, consisting largely of critics and other musicians, was loosely gathered around an assortment of couches, coffee tables and half-torn-down posters from previous gigs.

Dressed in her characteristic long boots, dark stockings and a short, sleek black dress, Stiles made her way, without chitchat, through a handful of songs, accompanied only by the full-bodied, rhythmic squall of her electric guitar.

On a couple of occasions, Stiles laid down the instrument to play songs from her upcoming a cappella album – and each time there was a brief, nerve-wracking waver as she searched for the right key. When she found it, her voice filled the quiet room with agile little melodies, none more than about a minute long. With no effects and no loop pedal, the performance was raw and immediate, and easily distinguishable from the work of most contemporary musicians working with voice (Julianna Barwick, Grouper or Caroline Shaw’s Roomful of Teeth, for example).

The album, entirely a cappella, is a departure for Stiles, invoking the antiquated arts of traditional folk and Eastern devotionals. There has always been an ahistorical feel to her earlier work – from the psychedelic grind and jangle of Songs, the band she co-fronts with the Max Doyle, to the stately primitivism of Bushwalking, a collaboration with Karl Scullin (Kes) and Nisa Venerosa (Fabulous Diamonds). Nothing she’s released so far, however, feels as anomalous as Ela Stiles.

Structurally, the album’s a lopsided thing, sharply divided into two halves. Side A is a series of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them love songs – Celtic-inflected ditties channeling the spirit of Shirley Collins and the 1960s trad folk revival – interspersed with fleeting hymnals that puncture the record’s otherwise melancholy tone. Recorded by Jack Farley (Beaches, Full Ugly, Twerps) in his signature hands-off style, the album features little studio trickery. Stiles’ vocals stand unadorned, with very few overdubs; just the faint aural ambience of Farley’s recording space.

“The vulnerability shows – a lone voice drowned in space – and it’s confronting at times.”

At the end of 2012, when most of these tracks were written, Stiles was going through a breakup with a long-term boyfriend. The vulnerability shows – a lone voice drowned in space – and it’s confronting at times. The album feels like an attempt at catharsis, and its loneliness is tempered by the ritualistic nature of the drones and harmonies on tracks like ‘Kumbh Mela’, the lead single and an album highlight. Bringing side A to a close, ‘Nothing Remains’ reconciles for an ecstatic 22 seconds the album’s divergent pulls towards the personal and the transcendent, as Stiles sings in fluttering soprano, “One morning I woke to find/all the bad times had been worked away/until nothing remained.”

The 10-minute ‘Drone Transitions’ makes up the record’s entire second half. Beginning with a tape-recorded vocal loop, the track was composed incrementally from layered vocals, pieced together this time by engineer John Duncan (ex-Silver Moon), “a brickie/labourer who records strictly one project a year.” The finished product swirls and undulates like a raga, one moment guttural and folksy, the next high-pitched and soaring.

Stiles, who can also play guitar, bass and flute, told me she considers herself “a singer above all.” Though she has no formal choral training, voice has always played a central role in her music. In Bushwalking, for example, Venerosa and Stiles’ vocals preside comfortably over the pummeling rhythm section and Scullin’s spidery guitar. On Songs’ latest album, the excellent Malabar, Stiles’ voice – its harmonies, yelps and leads – has become one of the band’s key dynamics. It’s fitting, then, that her solo album amounts to a kind of formalist exercise: an exploration of voice as instrument and texture, abstracted through the repetitive whir of drone.

If anything, Ela Stiles does feel like a one-off; a piece of ephemera from a mainstay of the Sydney scene. It’s a strange bird, with its odd cadence – skipping at first from track to track, then meditating at length on a single idea. And in the context of most other pop coming from Sydney and Melbourne right now, it gives the impression of having appeared out of nowhere. Sparse and austere, these sounds could have arisen from the ooze at almost any point in recorded history; out of time and place, but no less interesting for that.

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‘Ela Stiles’ is out now on vinyl and digital through Bedroom Suck.