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Linsey and Lizzie Create

Dangerous Song: Blue

Ally Bing

Musician Linsey Pollak
thought of using the calls performances, entitled The Extinction be appropriate accompaniment, one
of endangered animal Room, in the Hinterland region of the voice came to stand out: Lizzie O’Keefe.
species for the purpose of Sunshine Coast. In these sessions, the Linsey met Lizzie through a bandmate of
making electronic music
over ten years ago. He audience participated in an intimate The Unusual Suspects, Linsey’s fantastic
does it through the use of experience, each blindfolded and wearing 23-piece Balkan dance music ensemble,
a “midi wind controller”, a set of headphones. There was no other at the Woodford Folk Festival. She was
an electronic device that sound but for the animals’ cries, calls and also performing on the program that
looks and is played like a requests, translated into rhythmic looping year, and the Suspects, a band of already
wind instrument, albeit one
connected to some powerful and layering, creating harmonies, and outrageous proportions, invited Lizzie
sound programming on a enhancing a musicality in the voices of to hop on a microphone during one of
tablet. animals that was really there all along. their sets. The song she sang with them
In this way, Linsey entered a role of was typically uproarious and featured
An inventor (and accomplished player) of advocacy for threatened and endangered a typically bizarre time signature. It did
countless wind instruments, Linsey also species he continues to fulfil today. not faze her. There was no denying her

admired technology’s enablement of new inherent feel for music, which she says
and intriguing ways of creating music. He Linsey soon felt the human voice, so was born with her and nurtured by a
thought to use animal calls as looping important in creating that emotional musical family. Lizzie so easily improvised
samples, figuring they’d connect better connection with listeners, was missing vocals over eastern European-reminiscent
emotionally than your average electronic, from this project. While he originally scales and kept up with the twists and

insentient, noises. Linsey started concert imagined a small group of voices might turns of the odd rhythm that Linsey