Gazelle Twin

Under the Gazelle Twin name, Elizabeth Bernholz works as a producer, composer, and visual artist who probes dystopian currents of the twenty-first century through unyielding electronic music paired with arresting visuals. Layers of murky loops combined with her classically trained vocals became the haunted metropolis of sounds and memories that defined her debut full-length The Entire City in 2011. Visceral follow-up Unflesh from 2014 sharpened the industrial character of her sound while underscoring the role of costumes in her visual language; on the cover she appeared in her old school gym uniform to embody the physical unease threaded through the songs. Bernholz tightened the bond between sound and vision still further with 2018’s Pastoral, an unflinching portrait of intolerance embedded in English culture that set traditional elements such as English folk music and garb against contemporary assaultive electronics and sneakers, and continued that thread with the eerie evocations of lingering trauma on 2023’s Black Dog and its 2024 remix album Shadow Dogs. The built-in theatricality of Gazelle Twin’s output naturally led Bernholz to projects such as her 2016 stage adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel Kingdom Come and to score and soundtrack commissions including 2021’s The Power. Although Gazelle Twin’s personas and concepts shift without pause, Bernholz’s resolve to unsettle and provoke her audience remains constant.

Bernholz pursued music studies at the University of Sussex with the goal of becoming a composer. After completing her degree in 2006 she recognized a desire to perform the music she wrote and began appearing live; appearing onstage simply as herself, however, failed to generate the desired impact. Witnessing Fever Ray’s set at Brighton, England’s Loop Festival in 2009 convinced her to adopt the transformative possibilities of costume in her own practice. Gazelle Twin’s first single, “Changelings,” surfaced in 2010 on Something Nothing Records. Two further singles, “Men Like Gods” and “I Am Shell I Am Bone,” arrived the next year on the collective’s Anti-Ghost Moon Ray imprint ahead of the July release of debut album The Entire City. Titled after a painting by surrealist Max Ernst, whose birdlike character Loplop also shaped Bernholz’s costuming, the record’s warped electronic constructions mapped the intersection of places and memories. Strong reviews greeted both The Entire City and 2012’s The Entire City Remixed. The Mammal EP followed in January 2013, containing a Wire cover, two new tracks, and remixes by Clint Mansell and Kuedo.

For the next Gazelle Twin album Bernholz drew on varied strands of body horror encompassing miscarriage, body dysmorphia, and European colonization, along with her earlier medical studies and the synth textures associated with John Carpenter and Iggy Pop’s Berlin period. Co-produced and mixed by Wrangler’s Benge and recorded in her home studio, the raw September 2014 release Unflesh again placed Bernholz in her school gym uniform on the cover as a direct embodiment of its uneasy themes and once more earned widespread critical praise. She extended the album through the 2015 short film Out of Body, a collaboration with animator and filmmaker Carla McKinnon commissioned by the London Short Film Festival. Another commission, Kingdom Come for the Future Everything Festival, followed; this multimedia stage work based on J.G. Ballard’s 2006 novel about everyday fascism featured Stuart Warwick, Lone Taxidermist’s Natalie Sharp, and Bernholz’s husband and live Gazelle Twin member Jez Bernholz, premiering in March 2016. That same month Gazelle Twin issued the soundtrack to Out of Body, while July brought the Unflesh remix collection Fleshed Out containing reworkings by Blanck Mass, Dave Clarke, Perc, and Wrangler.

A studio recording of Kingdom Come appeared in November 2017, yet by then Bernholz was already immersed in her subsequent project. Drawing on ideas from Kingdom Come, the political atmosphere in the U.K. and Europe, her family’s relocation to the countryside, and her own postpartum depression, she examined how malice conceals itself behind seemingly benign traditions by contrasting folk elements with frantic electronics and pitch-shifted vocals. The outcome was September 2018’s widely acclaimed Pastoral, whose cover showed Bernholz as a grinning figure clad in a hybrid of traditional English folk-dancing attire and football-hooligan trainers.

Consistent with prior albums, Bernholz broadened Pastoral’s universe; in 2019 the drone choir NYX joined her for a radically reimagined live rendering of its songs at the London Jazz Festival. That year also yielded the standalone singles “Dirge MMXVIII” and “Fool.” December 2020 saw the release of Bernholz’s score for Welcome to the Blumhouse: Nocturne as well as her track “History” for the Cyberpunk 2077 video-game soundtrack. Deep England, the studio document of her NYX collaboration, emerged in March 2021 and was quickly followed by her first Invada release, the score for the feminist horror film The Power created with composer Max De Wardener. July 2023 brought the score for the television series Then You Run, which recalled the sonic palette of Unflesh. That October marked Bernholz’s return with the first Gazelle Twin album in five years; triggered by recollections of a shadowy figure glimpsed in childhood, Black Dog’s taut, atmospheric pieces merged early terrors with parental anxieties.

Early 2024 delivered the digital release We Wax. We Shall Not Wane, drawn from Gazelle Twin’s audio installation of the same name commissioned for The Horror Show exhibition at London’s Somerset House and tracing centuries of violence against women, with a portion of proceeds directed to the charity End Violence Against Women. October 2024 introduced the Black Dog remix album Shadow Dogs, featuring reinterpretations by Beak>, Gary Numan, and Keeley Forsyth.