NGPE Conversations #1: Inside Helen Svoboda’s Genre-Less Cinematic Odyssey
For the past five years, I’ve casually compiled playlists based around an idea I’ve called Noisy <Gender> Punk Energy. Broadly, it’s about documenting the work of artists of marginalised genders. Earlier this year, I got a blog. Now, in collaboration with Nothing Ever Happens in Brisbane, we’re having chats.
For our inaugural chat, I’m talking with Meanjin/Brisbane NGPE alum Helen Svoboda.
Helen is, to put it bluntly, one of the most dizzyingly accomplished and prolific musicians in the country. An upright bassist, composer, and vocalist, she’s been a driving force behind at least ten different albums since 2019 and guested on countless others.
Intriguingly, Helen is also strikingly hard to pin down. Her work ranges from swirling, sawing stretches of bowed ambience (2021’s Dormant, I Lay) and gorgeous, percolating jazz compositions (four-piece collaboration album Aura, from the same year) to frenetic, fractured art-folk (duo Meatshell’s Face) and floating, yearning, lyrical songwriting (2020’s A Tree Tells).
Her latest work is 2023’s The Odd River. It’s both an album and a movie that she’s been working on with filmmaker Angus Kirby and her collaborators for the past three years. (Her dad even ended up pitching in as an actor.) On Thursday 30 November, she’ll finally get a chance to screen the film in Brisbane.
Previously, Helen and I discovered that her grandmother and my grandmother knew each other in an older Brisbane. In this conversation, I was delighted to discover that her film had been shot around the South East Queensland environments of my hometown and my family’s general stomping grounds.
Image credit: Documentation Archive
Interview edited for length and clarity.
MJ O’Neill (MJ): So, you’ve been working on this for, what, two years, three years?
Helen Svoboda (HS): Three years. It’s the biggest project I've ever had as a ‘creative lead’. I was nominated for an award in 2020 and asked to really dream big for what I’d do with the funding. And, after a bit of thought, I pitched a film album about genetically modified food with Angus Kirby. And, then, I won. So, we had to make it. Except, it was 2020. So, we’ve had to deal with COVID-19, trying to figure out how to shoot between Melbourne and Queensland, and record eight different musicians around the world.
After all that time, it just felt like such a huge wave of relief when we finally got to launch it and share the film and the music. I honestly didn’t realise how vulnerable I was feeling, putting out a project that big with so many people involved, until the day after we launched it in Melbourne and I was just *elated* with the feedback. I still feel very vulnerable, very relieved, and so grateful for the response it’s received.
MJ: Has it been a struggle to figure out how to release it?
HS: Yeah, when I first pitched the idea, I actually pitched it as being a USB album! It was a real challenge, for a while, as to what it even was. Was it a film with a soundtrack? Was it like an extended music video? I didn’t even know how we were going to play the music live. Eventually, we decided - ‘it’s a movie and it’s an album’. So, we released the album, and now, we’re figuring out screenings. In Melbourne, I played a set of ‘interpreted’ music from the project and that felt right. We’re still thinking about all the other ways to release and experience the film, though.
MJ: How did the creative process work with Angus?
Image credit: Documentation Archive
HS: It was definitely a collaboration. Interestingly, the album actually has the pieces in a different order than the film. That was always the idea. I had a very specific soundworld I wanted to explore and I had ideas as to what that would look like but I said to Angus - ‘If you want to just twist all this around and do it in a different order, just go for it’. And, he absolutely did. And, I loved it. It was a really unique process of mutual inspiration.
MJ: Why a film?
HS: I think I felt like a film environment could be a bit more freeing for my music? Like, my music always feels like it sits at multiple different fringes. I don’t really know where it fits and, lately, I’ve just stopped even trying to figure it out. But, with film, you don’t really think about genre as much. I felt like, by proposing a film, it allowed me to not be boxed into any particular musical style because the music is informed directly by an aesthetic and a story. It let me break out of boxes, break out of genres, and just get a group of my dream musicians onto a dream project and just really let my voice as a composer come through.
Helen Svoboda and Angus Kirby’s film The Odd River will be screened at Palace Centro Cinemas on Thursday 30 November. You can purchase tickets here. If you think you could be a Noisy <Gender> Music Energy artist, reach out and get in touch for a chat.
