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Music

Carla Dal Forno Is Better Off Alone

Spotlight: After years making music as part of collaborations, the Melbourne-born songwriter is making uniquely gloomy recordings under her own name.

All photos by Tonje Thilesen.

A less rational person would have blamed ghosts. In December of 2015, after a brief stint living in Berlin, Carla Dal Forno had just moved back to her native Melbourne, Australia and into a house recently abandoned by an old friend. She was living alone—sleeping on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by dust and ephemera from her friend's recently dissolved relationship. But then things she couldn't explain started happening: electrical wall sockets would buzz erratically; lamps would flicker off and on uncontrollably. She blamed it on "dodgy wiring" and an equally dodgy landlord who refused to do repairs on the house, but on a recent Skype call from Berlin, she seems to have never really gotten to the bottom of it: "I was quite frightened at times."

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She soon found another place to live in Melbourne. But before she did, she set about working on her music, crafting spectral, post-punk recordings that distracted her from her surroundings while also mirroring the ambient gloom. You can hear that sulking fear in the slow chime of the guitar lines on "Better Yet," the B-side of a single she released earlier this year on Blackest Ever Black.

Dal Forno recorded her debut solo LP, You Know What It's Like—due out October 28 on Blackest Ever Black—before "Better Yet," before she moved into that house. Coincidentally, when she'd started working on the album in late 2014, she'd been living in a different Melbourne residence that was also, by her own description, "falling apart." It had an outdoor toilet and lacked space for a proper studio, so she set up rudimentary recording gear at the kitchen table. "You could see the sky through the cracks in the wall, and it was hideously cold in the winter," she says. Making these meditative pieces—usually composed of distantly droning guitars, gasps of reverberating synthesizers, and dry-cough drum machines—served the same purpose in the one space that it did the other: to pass the time, to get out of her own head.

Though she'd studied classical cello throughout her childhood and adolescence, Dal Forno's relationship to music, until now, has been largely collaborative. After college in Australia, where she got a degree in fine arts with a focus in painting, she started playing guitar in "jangle guitar pop bands" around Melbourne. "[Guitar pop bands are] an easy place to start out as a musician when you don't have much technical skill on an instrument," she says. The simple songs she used to make, she explains, were a far cry from the solemn recordings she makes under her own name. "I would be able to write a song and only play two simple chords and feel a sense of accomplishment quite quickly," she says.

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After college, She'd flit through a number of projects of varying degrees of seriousness and success. One of the groups Dal Forno fronted, Mole House, released a charmingly ramshackle self-titled tape on esteemed Minnesota DIY label Night People before the band eventually folded earlier this decade. Soon, she branched out, playing multiple instruments and singing with Blackest Ever Black bands Tarcar and F ingers, which would go on to put out records that were both more austere and less song-shaped than her previous work. She was never working with more than a couple of people at a time, and her most consistent collaborator, fellow Melbourne-born multi-instrumentalist Tarquin Manek, still occasionally contributes production help on her solo work. Each of these early projects, she says, was the result of the unique alchemy between its constituent players. "The aesthetic of group projects is always influenced by all the members," she says when I ask her about the difference in tone between Mole House and what followed. "It just happened naturally by who I was working with."

Dal Forno started working on a solo album in 2014, mostly because she wanted to prove to herself that she had the skills to do things on her own terms. "I've always felt like everyone [I made music with] was more experienced than me," she says. "[They] knew more about recording techniques and even setting up to play a live show." She needed to figure things out on her own—so she did, holing up in those broken houses in Melbourne and Berlin, and emerging with beautifully broken songs.

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The first two solo songs she ever wrote were "Fast Moving Cars" and "What You Gonna Do Now?," not coincidentally the first two singles released from You Know What It's Like. She calls them "pop"—"whatever that is," she jokingly adds—but only to the extent that they include guitars and sometimes-intelligible lyrics. At their most radio-ready, the songs recall the dead-eyed post-punk of Young Marble Giants, but most of the time the grayscale abstraction of F ingers and Tarcar is still present. There's more sections on the record where drum machines rattle like blinds thwacking against a half-open window than there are real hooks.

You Know What It's Like is only eight tracks long, including a short, wordless intro, and a few mostly instrumental compositions. She describes most of the lyrics as an attempt to "[communicate] with someone," but whatever she's trying to convey to that person is invariably garbled by echo. With its barely-there vocals and windswept guitar accents, closer "The Same Reply" recreates the emotional experience of finding a message in a bottle where the ink's irreparably smudged by saltwater; the message is there in the stains and smudges, and it's all the more poignant because you can't exactly what tell what the person who wrote it was trying to tell you.

Despite the bitter cold and electrical precarity of the months she spent recording the new material, Dal Forno says that she finds something fulfilling in the solitary nature of her process. Though she started working by herself so that she'd learn the skills she needed to thrive as an artist, doing so has allowed her to access something beyond the alchemical abstractions of her earlier work.

When pressed, she struggles to pinpoint exactly what that new something is, simply stating that "some people need [to be alone] more than others." But listening back to "Fast Moving Cars," one of the more lyrically legible songs on the record, one might say that she's already provided something of a hint, albeit in the form of a question. It's one that reads as hopeful, perhaps because of the way she sings it: "Now we're alone—what will we do?"