Gordi: Our Two Skins | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- On a long-haul plane ride mid-way between Australia and Europe, Sophie Payten, known as Gordi, lost the plot. Following the release of her debut album, Reservoir, she’d finished med-school, toured with Asgeir and Of Mice and Men, and begun to fall in love with a woman, something she experienced for the first time against the backdrop of the marriage equality debate.

A full-blown panic attack saw her scramble over her sleeping neighbours, and lock herself in the bathroom. Our Two Skins opens on the sprawling, six-minute track coincidentally called Airplane Bathroom, which she frantically penned in the next twenty minutes. “Do you see yourself unravelling?” she asks her twin in the mirror. The lyrics convey a total vulnerability, an exhaustion from self-delusion and distraction. For the first time, her full self comes into focus, but we get the sense that this is only the beginning of her journey.

To record the album, Payten invited Chris Messina and Zach Hansen to the Canowindra farm that’s been in her family for one-hundred-and-fifty years. Regular collaborators on projects like Bon Iver and Hand Habits, Sophie says the pair were used to ‘guerilla-style’ recording, but a remote cottage in central-west New South Wales was a new challenge for them. Their updated tool kit for harvesting, scratching up and re-amping sounds from the field included a tape recorder found on Gumtree and a former wasp-nest home of a stereo to boot. The opening sample which finds its way into Airplane Bathroom - of footsteps, a screen door opening and shutting, Payten sitting down at the piano - welcomes her listeners into the room with her, this place of familiarity where she’ll make her way through the unrest and the adrenaline of time away.

The next track, Unready, begins on some of Payten’s crispest vocals, as she sings: “The ground underneath my feet was cold / I wasn’t looking for you.” Urgent, textured percussion lines and glittering synth melodies mirror the rush of recognising that life is about to change in ways that are both exciting and terrifying. The song has a Robyn-like way of holding equal space for joy and unease, and the breathless elation of Maggie Rogers shedding an old skin in Alaska.

On Volcanic, two halves of a song are in dialogue with each other. In the first, metered vocals attempt to explain what it feels like to experience eruptions of anxiety and unwillingly push others away. The second is like a manifestation of the lyrics, with a piano motif that gets faster and faster, swept away like a train gaining too much speed, suffocating Payten’s distorted voice.

We get a proper peek-in at the brand new love the singer has been nursing on Radiator. Against a warm, slightly scuffed up piano melody, the emotion in her voice is magnified, fear and conviction spilling out as she sings: “Intoxicating, devastating, there was no more hesitating: I had to love you.” Its close marks the midpoint of the record, and ushers in a second half of more self-assured tracks.

In the past, Payten has been private about the personal details of her music: when she sings about relationships, she usually foregos pronouns altogether, and while a reckoning with sexuality is central to this album, a big coming-out anthem would feel out of place. On Look Like You, however, the singer assesses the impact of feeling othered by strangers and society, inserting herself in what she’s called the huge ‘tapestry’ of queer experience. It reminds me of a quote by Sally Rugg talking about her time running the ‘Yes’ campaign during the marriage equality debate. She says that often, LGBTQ people share stories of vulnerability with the public “in the desperate hope they’ll see their humanity reflected in ours”.

Payten certainly doesn’t have to prove anything to anybody, but I’m struck by how the decision to make her experience visible may combat the same feeling of other-ness that her listeners might relate to. In fact, she joins the growing canon of diverse queer artists who show it is possible to flourish outside the mainstream.

Our Two Skins’ last full-blown love song, Free Association, is also its final track. The production is warm without being too perfect or clean, the lyrics hopeful for a future filled with simple delights. We go out on a triumphant soundscape that feels miles away from the uneasy churn of Airplane Bathroom - airy vocals, expansive drum beats and warm buzz of Payten’s beloved harmonium. The same sample that opened the record closes it out, and as the screen door of the Canowindra cottage closes, she leaves with us the lightness of coming home.

- Aleisha McLaren.