About Me
Thembi Soddell’s volatile sonic worlds morph, shift, rupture and dis-rupture into filmic atmospheres with a distinctly disquieting edge. Contorted into unreal environments and luscious masses of sonic textures, her sound palate sources field recordings, instruments and electronics to be suggestive but often unidentifiable. Her compositions exploit the dynamic extremes, toying with the listeners’ sense of expectation and generating anticipatory suspense.
Living and working in Melbourne, Australia, she does work for CD, gallery installation, and live performance, having been involved in many of Australia's major sound festivals, such as What is Music?, Liquid Architecture and The Now Now Festival of Spontaneous Music. She recently toured Europe as part of a collaborative duo with cellist, Anthea Caddy. She is a graduate with honours in sound art from RMIT's Fine Art Department. She also assists in running the Australian experimental music label, Cajid Media.
DISCOGRAPHY ILAND - Thembi Soddell and Anthea Caddy
2006 (cajid 007CD)
ILAND is where the textural and dynamic capabilities of extended cello and sampler performance collide. Mapping spaces bordered by isolation, paranoia and dislocation, this collaboration between Australian sound artists Anthea Caddy and Thembi Soddell describes a provocative and tense sonic world. From the damp obscurity of condemned architecture to the laboratory conditions of anechoic and reverb chambers, Caddy extends the sonic capabilities of cello through a response to the distinct acoustics of the space she performs within. Combined with Soddell’s unique and expressive treatment of sonic textures and her signature approach to narrative structure through dynamic extremity, ILAND moves through a dense core of physically and psychologically contrasting formations to become a singular act of intense and cathartic sonic expression.
INSTANCE - Thembi Soddell
2005 (cajid 005CD)
Instance continues Thembi's exploration of dynamics, abstracting various sound sources, from field recordings to instrument textures, into sonic interpretations of her dreams.
"Soddell’s work with dynamics is extremely accomplished, alternately forcing close attention and then rewarding it with shocking explosions of activity that bring any absent-minded trains of thought right back into a brutal present. This strategy is analogous to the remembering of a dream, the recombining of dreamed events into a comprehensible sequence. The work suggests all the uncertainty of a nightmare recounted, with all its gaps and discontinuities of narrative. The virtue of this for the listener is that it will keep you on edge throughout." - Michael Day, Diffusion, Sonic Arts Network
INTIMACY - Thembi Soddell
2004 (cajid 001CD)
From sounds on the threshold of perception to rupturing bursts of noise, these manipulated and sculpted environmental recordings hint at an evocative and emotional narrative.
"incites tense listening" - jonathan marshall, real time
