How Virginia Woolf Inspired This Upcoming Music Video From Rising Adelaide Artist

As an artist - an artist in truly every sense of the word - Thea Martin prioritises fragility and fragmentation. 

The musician behind indie project short snarl, Martin released Gossamer Songs, their debut solo EP, in mid-June. The tangled, intimate collection of tracks indicates a gentle artistic sensibility, one that is prone to introspection and suggests a literary bent.

A particular stand-out on the EP is “Part II: Time Passes.” Tenderly kaleidoscopic, the track encompasses all of these values, and is soon to enjoy an accompanying music video, directed by Martin and slated for a January 9th release.

“I want more people to hear this song,” Martin says about the decision to create a music video for it. “It’s also the song that I most clearly had a visual image for, both in the lyrics and also just the memory of when I wrote the song and what images I was talking about. It felt the most natural to try to add some visual accompaniment.”

The song is named after the middle section in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 modernist masterpiece, To The Lighthouse, which happens to be Martin’s favourite novel.

“In this section of the book, the house and the natural world almost takes on more of a character than the previous section’s ensemble cast of people. And you find out really significant changes in these people’s lives through the voice of the house and the environment. And I thought that was really cool.”

Martin adds, “I had a really nice time reading it when I was at university, lying in the grass and falling asleep and waking up and reading more and falling asleep. And I wanted the song and the video to feel like that.”

The music video, filmed on a 2006 camcorder, has an endearing DIY quality. Martin attributes this to their “limited resources.” They add, “The whole EP has a pretty lo-fi DIY feel to it, so it felt right to have the visuals match that. I’m very fussy with what, in my brain, is the correct shade of green for being outdoors, and I just wanted to find a place that had the right warm green which I associate the whole record with.”

The video centres on Martin, and their mundane, loose movements, ensconced in a leafy environment. “The song uses the word ‘stumble’ a lot - I like the idea of stumbling about with no sense of direction.” They cite the work of dancer and choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker as a major inspiration for the tone of the video.

It felt natural for Martin to turn to Woolf, a writer, as a means of musical inspiration. “I think that being an artist means surrounding yourself with all kinds of creative input. And the more places you can draw that from the better. I personally connect with writing most in relation to my music. Particularly Modernist writing,” Martin says, referring to the experimental school of thought which emerged in the late nineteenth century, fronted by writers like Woolf and James Joyce, “because I want to make things that feel fragmented and a bit abstract and fragile. And a lot of writing, particularly by queer women from that period, resonates with me in that way.”

Vinyl pressings of Gossamer Songs are now officially available instore at Clarity Records and online at Hobbledehoy Records.