By Arne Sjostedt
Singer songwriter Tash Parker is a dreamer and releaser of sonic ideas. Raised on a fruit farm in Western Australia, she has given the universe many fine indie-folk opportunities, and has lately taken a fork in the road to explore an electo-pop route.
Teaming up with Hans Van Vliet and Becki Whitton, Parker does the song writing and hands her sketches over to producer Van Vliet to make the soundscape come alive.
With both coming from visual art background, she graduated from RMIT in 2016, their unique sensibilities combine together to create an amazing musical art product that reminds you of every good thing you would expect to hear when creatives harmonise the instruments of their craft.
“The way that we started working together, I saw saw him performing with his band a few years ago,” she says. “And we realised we both use visual language to describe musical ideas.”
For Van Vliet, that comes from an animation background, while Parker says she studied sculpture and spacial practice.
“He is a game designer and animator,” Parker says. “That is his day job. So we started working together and he’s been producing my work.”
A seasoned performer when it comes to hitting the stage with a guitar, “this is a really different project sonically,” Parker says.
Blending folk sensibility with electro nouse, “I think that lyrically, the songs are quite pop, but they come from a story teller background. And they are relatively intimate stories.”
Having performed previously under a range of other projects and names, following her debut release as Parker called Can’t Keep Waiting, the singer has a new single out titled Become the Fool.
Feeling like an instant alt pop hit from a modern vocalist, “From my perspective, it’s about about being left by someone in a very sudden and surprising way," Parker says. “I feel like it’s quite a universal story.”
The song is accompanied by stunning video clip made by Van Vliet.
“Because he had written the song for me and produced it all, it was so nice for him to go in and make the video. He understands the nuance of the song and the emotion of the song.”
Vliet made the classy clip in three weeks with the game engine UNITY, and a fabric simulation software that simulates how fabric will fall and behave. He then matched this with motion capture of dancers from a creative commons library.
"Realise dancers have donated their time and their movement from all over the world. We actually chose two dancers from Cyrus," Parker says.
There is even a making of video, on how the video was made and put together.
Today residing in a tree house in Launceston, Parker still leans on her trusty guitar and uke to kick off her song writing process. She then hands these creative beginnings over to her main man in this project to bring them into a new space. Every sound is built from scratch, as Van Vliet considers the emotion and narrative of the song.
“When he is producing the track, all of the sounds that he is considering are designed to evoke the same feeling that we’re trying to evoke in the lyric,” Parker explains. “So in folk music, you have your guitar and banjos and instrumentation that we classically really recognise. With Hans we basically paint with sounds in a way where we are trying to build the story. Not only through the lyrics but also thought he sounds we are using.”