Lisa Lerkenfeldt

Shelter Press are please to present the new album from Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist and musician Lisa Lerkenfeldt, ‘Halos of Perceptions’ due for release November 3^rd. Today, Lisa shares the lead single 'Stairway to the Interior'. 

The album follows a trio of releases for the label in 2020; ‘A Garden Dissolves Into Black Silk’, ‘Collagen’, and ‘A Liquor of Daisies’.

Stemming from a serendipitous encounter with an original Cave Clan member that led to many underground adventures, ‘Halos of Perceptions’ explores the worlds that exist outside of our perceptions. Drawing inspiration from a photoset Lisa had collated, revealing alien textures, tunnels that stretch on into abysses of their own, underground flowing streams. Light is sparse and delicate, something reflected by the flickering and wavering in Lisa’s piano compositions.

The record echoes the city of its conception in numerous ways; moving almost seamlessly from a world of leisurewear, infinite milk alternatives and blaring neons to stretches of green by the water that brimmed with sounds and life, people climbing the Burnley bouldering wall, butterflies suspended in the hot wind unidentifiable. All coalesce and conjure ideas about hidden ecosystems, imagined spaces and networks of care.

Lisa notes that “infrastructure is often designed to keep people out”—cut doors into fencing and clipped wires show an active and ongoing defiance of this. She speaks about how her Cave Clan friend used to go down to this painted room and read in solitude, using candles for light. The way sound exists underground, encased in these hollow cement tunnels, a painted room with its own deep hum. How people used to hold underground shows, how there were rules for safety (no exploring after rain, never alone) that was shared with each other. This warmth and absorption of other’s experiences is present in Lisa’s work—it’s immersive, like wading in water.

There is a strong sense of transitory worlds with recorded sound, how this technology captures memory, and the exploratory pursuits of Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening Band. These citations of memory and deep listening inform Lisa’s use of analogue and classical instruments, playback artefacts and acoustic feedback in her own world-building. When speaking about ‘Halos of Perception’, she describes it “as a fascination with timbre and acoustic artefacts.”

Ideas of networks and enmeshment are felt deeply in Lisa’s compositions, motifs overlaid over each other evoking the image of many hands interlinking playfully, tenderly, softly. The way her compositions delve into refraction and echo makes me think about the tunnels and the way they splinter off into many possibilities. Manipulated textures reminiscent of the chalky, earthy, moss air that perfumes the tunnels’ subterranean air. Tactile details that gesture towards close attention, verging on obsession.

This work is also about imagining ecosystems of potential. Lisa shared, that during this project, she has been reimagining subterranean networks in dreams, thinking about the buoyancy of oral traditions, and the way water moves—from the sky to the earth, through the ground, connecting all these spheres. Realised in collaboration with hyperreal video artist Tristan Jalleh, Lisa’s alternative portrait of the underground melds waterfalls, leaks, flower graffiti, and hidden messages lit up by imagined light sources with existing subterranean networks. There’s a real sense of wonder in this world she has built, how the city can reveal itself to you with some patience and care, how the city and its secrets can find its way into your dreams.