“Intermission: The In Between”

Intermission is the sophomore album from IKSRE (I Keep Seeing Rainbows Everywhere) – aka Naarm/Melbourne-based vocalist, multi instrumentalist and producer, Phoebe Dubar. A year in the making and finished during lockdown, this nine-track album features her trademark lush synths, layered vocals, strings and binaural beats, against the epic backdrop of field recordings captured up and down the east coast of Australia. It’s an aural holiday for a year of restricted movement.

In addition to previously released singles, Wylah, August and A Day Off, the album features six new tracks: Gibbous, a sonic exploration of man vs machine. It opens with the freakish, robotic birdcall of the Spangled Drongo, patiently unfolding to a crescendo of synths, vocals and strings, before closing with a chorus of other birdcalls. It highlights the importance of the field recordings in Dubar’s creative process; every single one taken by her, at the start of the writing process, and informs the ensuing song.

“I never know what I’m going to find when I go out with my recorder. But the longer I sit and the less I expect anything, the more I see nature unfolding before my eyes. The sample at the start of Gibbous was a bird I heard whilst recording in Noosa, Queensland. I couldn’t believe this alien sound emerging from the bush, it sounded like a mangled sample, not something natural. It got me thinking about the idea of the natural vs digital world and the tension between the two. We take so many resources from the natural world to make these things that fill our homes; but we never give back to it. But we are now at a point in history where maybe, just maybe, we might start changing our habits, and begin to consider the natural world a little more than we have in the past.”

On nature as her inspiration, mention should be made to the spacious No 2 in E (Billabong) which mimics a chamber orchestra, with Dubar’s viola and synths using the undulating call of the Brown Cuckoo Dove as her conductor.

I recorded this in the bush just near Sydney. What struck me was the incessant “woop woop” birdcall throughout it, and the stunning chorus of other birds around it. It felt like nature’s orchestra. So I decided to use the Cuckoo Dove as my conductor, and set the tempo of the song to match it, along with the key. The bird call undulates a little throughout and I followed along with it, hence it’s slightly elastic nature. It was such a great representation of the fact that all I aim to do is create something which is as beautiful as the natural world. But in the end, mother nature is the greatest artist. We can never replicate her beauty, just sit back and marvel at its perfection.”

Rounding out the album, the deeply emotive A Storm to Begin which brings her vocal talents to the fore alongside sweeping strings and the backdrop of a rainstorm; the aching, restrained Heart Goes .. which opens with a simple heartbeat, swells to a crescendo before closing the album with a question mark; the lapping waters of Boorangoora (aka Lake MacKenzie), a huge, inland lake on K’garii (fka Fraser Island) juxtaposed with an expansive choir of voices; and All the Sparrows Have Left the City, which, like the album title, feels like an intermission, its tension building but never fully resolving, hinting at this “in between” stage we find ourselves at in the world right now.

“This is our time to pause. Our time to stop. Our time to look hard at the stuff we usually push down and avoid. Now is the time for us to bring that to the surface and look hard at what we have become. Pick things apart, throw away the things that no longer serve us, and breathe fresh new life into the things that sustain us, the things that have mattered to us through these strange times we’ve been living through. This is our intermission, our in between, and if we do the work now, we can move into the next act with confidence”.

Intermission is out on all digital platforms on 31 July 2020