Ezekiel RodofiliBecki Whitton has been working on music for a good while now, both for others and on her own stuff under the name Aphir. With an album, Avarena, releasing soon and her being on the lineup for the Art As Catharsis Fifteen-year Anniversary show in Melbourne, I spoke to her about her work.
Photo by Anna Mayberry.
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Ez: How I know about you is from interviewing Kat Hunter (Lack the Low) about eight years ago for a now-defunct publication. When I saw that you’re playing the Art As Catharsis show in Melbourne, I got curious about your work.
For people who don’t know what you do, could you get a bit into both your production work and your own music?
Becki: Those two things operate in a bit of a symbiosis to me. I do a lot of mixing and mastering, and sometimes production for artists. Some of it has been for Kat, and that is really inspiring to me with my own artist projects. It’s a way that I’ve learned a lot about production and a place where I’ve been able to see what other people are doing and work out where I fit into that landscape, and what aspects of other people’s work I’m more influenced by.
But yeah, to talk about the Aphir side of things more, there’s two strands of that. I make a lot of ambient music which is what I’ll be playing for the upcoming Art As Catharsis show, and I also make stuff that’s kind of like…
I was thinking about it the other day as sort of like pop with a lot of soluble fibre in it. I guess it’s a grittier sound that harks back to more traditional pop or folk songwriting structures.
Ez: In terms of production, my experience of your work is on One Eye Closed and God-Carrier, but you’ve produced other artists such as G Flip and Medhanit. How would you describe the way you produce? At least from what I’ve heard, you have a sort of fuller, more breathing sound.
Becki: Most of what I’m doing in the audio engineering world is, these days, a lot of mastering. For Lack the Low it was stem mastering. For God-Carrier and I did some vocal production, and then mastered those tracks from Kat’s mixes and I mixed the vocals into them.
Being so close to the work that I do, it’s hard for me to say whether I have a stamp or sound that I put on things. By the time I’m mastering a lot of the sonic signature is there in the work. I don’t wanna change it too much; I wanna show off the arrangements and the songwriting to the absolute best that it can be shown, and the most appropriate that it can be shown. I’m mastering for that context. It’s about having a read on the world of that piece of music, and being able to translate that understanding into how I’d do the final EQ and the final treatment of dynamics.
Ez: And for other artists, there’s a pretty wide range coming to you. Other than G Flip and Medhanit, you’ve got Jessica Mauboy, Bec Sandridge and Closure in Moscow. Even if all the sonics are all there, do you find that you have to adjust or reshape your approach for every different project?
Becki: Definitely. It’s a lot of flexibility. It’s so much about listening and responding to the work that comes through, and also with the different projects that you mentioned, I’ve played different roles. For Jessica Mauboy, I’ve only mixed some stuff from her recent album. For Closure in Moscow, I was vocal engineering. I basically recorded all the vocals on that record bar a couple here and there on “Better Way”. But also part of that job was co-writing *laughs* ’cause when Chris rocked up in the studio with that record, he was kinda like “Alright! Let’s get down to recording. Some of the top lines aren’t written yet.”
We spent a bunch of time just hammering that out and making sure that everything fit in the world that was already established with those songs. So it was very different practices, I suppose.
Ez: Would you say that you’re more vocal-centric or instrument-centric in your production?
Becki: There’s a really clear shift to me, pre- and post-pandemic. Before the pandemic, most of what I was doing was recording vocals for people. Then because of lockdowns and social distancing, I think that vocal production in Australia, in studios, became much more rare because the pandemic kind of forced a lot of artists to learn how to do it themselves.
During that time, because heaps of artists were making significantly more work than they had been before because they couldn’t tour, I just got a ton of more mixing and mastering clients, so that then became more my specialty. Closure in Moscow are kind of an outlier ’cause that was post-pandemic. Other than that, I haven’t really done much vocal production since the pandemic.
Ez: Has that also reflected in the way you approach your own music?
Becki: For me as an artist, the pandemic was a very vocal-centric time, I think in response to not being able to get into the studio with vocal production clients. So I did a lot of Twitch streaming, which was like a way of practising talking to people still in a situation where I was also doing my work, ’cause I was like “I’m gonna forget how to do this if I don’t actually practise it somehow”. So I started Twitch streaming, showing my production work. Then the second year of lockdown I started doing these marathon vocal improvisation streams, just gradually going for longer and longer spans of time on these live stream settings.
It got up to like, twelve hours *laughs* of just, you know, relentless singing to an online audience. Which physically is quite taxing. It was a very meditative exercise in that, as these streams got longer and longer, I had to really reflect on what my body was doing, if I had blood still flowing to my legs whilst sitting, these kinds of things. And so, I just started doing this style of ambient music that’s completely just vocals and becoming more confident in that improvisational world.
Ez: Would you say that that shift was key in your upcoming release, Avarena?
Becki: Um… No actually. It’s funny; I released a couple of albums that were essentially a product of those marathon streams, just going through the recordings of them and picking out the pieces that resonated with me. It reached a point where I could see where people really clicked with the ambient music, and there was this fiendish temptation to keep churning out ambient records ’cause it’s easy to do and it’s so meditative to me. I still do ambient Twitch streams, but for me they’re not really a challenge.
I’m kind of exercising getting back into songwriting in a way that does pose a challenge. It’s produced in Ableton, it utilises some choral samples of mine, but it’s a lot of synths; a lot of gritty, noisy sounds accompanied by quite folky songwriting structures a lot of the time. And some of more chanted… I don’t know how to describe it. It’s a little bit like Republic of Paradise crossed with a few more traditional song structures.
It was also a big, necessary outpouring of emotion after some big events in my life, so it’s just the combination of those two things.
Ez: With Avarena, did you sort of have a moment of “waking up” followed by going into the work really heavily?
Becki: I don’t think it was exactly like that. I wrote a bunch of the songs in a time when I felt quite happy and optimistic, and a bit maybe blissfully naïve. Basically, the album as a whole is a narrative. It follows me feeling quite blissfully naïve about a situation and then tracks its collapse. It’s very fertile ground for writing songs.
Ez: Would you say then that it’s a record that has a veneer of bliss and happiness that gets thinner as the record goes on?
Becki: I’d say by the end of the records it’s really quite gone *laughs* I think people who have been similar relationships to the one that Avarena kind of tracks will recognise the emotional trajectory. I don’t think it’s an uncommon kind of thing to tell yourself a story about how something’s going to go and the potential that it has, then to learn more. To really get educated by life.
Ez: Why do you think the inspiring life situation holds fertile ground for music?
Becki: I guess this is one of those fundamental deep questions about art. I think it’s less personal in a way because I guess art comes out of that essential contradiction of things in the world being extremely beautiful and extremely shit all at once, right? Art has a way of upholding the beautiful side and perhaps even upholding the shit side?
Making things from something that has been quite harrowing and giving it a purpose. The purpose being other people relating to it and experiencing catharsis because they go on this journey you’ve presented them with and it’s kind of a way of processing those feelings.
Ez: Jumping around a bit, I noticed you did an improvisational soundtrack for La Planète sauvage (Fantastic Planet).
Becki: Oh my god, I’m so bummed that it got taken down off YouTube.
Ez: Oh did it?
Becki: Yeah, I got a copyright strike! *laughs*
Ez: But this is your own soundtrack.
Becki: It was because, I guess, the movie’s licensed and you’re not allowed to put it up outside of the channels. It’s not the music itself.
I chucked the soundtrack audio on Bandcamp and it’s pay what you want ‘cause I had to turn it into an MP3 to keep the link, but what is stopping anyone from just pressing play on the move and the soundtrack at the same time? Nothing.
Ez: How did you discover Fantastic Planet, and how did you end up deciding to do an improvisational soundtrack for it?
Becki: It was a recommendation from a friend. I had been soundtracking a few films on my Twitch channel, and I was asking people what else they thought I should soundtrack. Someone who knows me really well was like “This one”. Out of everything I’ve soundtracked out of Twitch, it was probably the most intuitive for me to respond to, and probably the best-suited to the kind of music that I make.
Ez: Would you say some of your music is filmic in nature?
Becki: I’m not a massive film buff so it’s hard for me to say yay or nay to this, but I get a lot of requests for my music to go in films or paired with digital materials, so based on an external review, I guess?
Ez: I imagine that there’s an interest in at least trying to recontextualise films through improvisational sound.
Becki: For me I find it fun and inspiring because… you’re sitting there for hours in a live stream making ambient music and mostly it’s coming from the feelings in me. It’s a bit more exciting to have it coming from the mood of a specific visual stimulus? If the visuals are my taste, the better the work is that I’m gonna create in response to it, you know?
Ez: Would you say that Avarena is a visual record?
Becki: I’m trying to make it as much a visual record as I can. I have recently gotten interested in conceptualising and editing my own music videos. There’s a couple of songs already released from Avarena and I’ve created music videos for them. For one of them I took a bunch of random footage from my phone and got some other people to send me footage, and collaged it together.
For the recent track, “Photokeratitis”, I had a really clear idea in my mind, and one of my friends really loves to shoot footage on a digicam. I made a lot of props in line of what kind of things would an e-girl who was obsessed with the occult own, and made this cult e-girl music video that I sort of directed and edited. That was really fun, and I’m hoping to make some more stuff for at least one of the other songs.
Ez: Do you think your music works better in a live or studio-recorded setting?
Becki: I think that my ambient music works best on Twitch. I’m ready to be proven wrong about this, but doing doing it live is hard, traditionally been hard. I’m really hoping to turn things around for the Art As Catharsis show, but ‘cause my vocals are looped and drenched in effects, it’s always tricky to get a balance that doesn’t feedback. So for the upcoming show I’m building in synths and some elements of foley that I hope take away a little bit from the need for the vocals to carry everything, or to be so thick on the ground.
But with my more lyrical stuff, these days I think it works well in both settings. I think I’ve been on a traditional novice to adept trajectory. When I started making this music, it was shit live and shit on recording. As I’ve gotten better as a mixing and mastering engineer, performer and producer and all these things, it’s come to a point where I wanna say it’s quite impactful in both settings.
Ez: Well, time to bomb it then.
Becki: *laughs* What’s the clanker?
Ez: Do you like music?
Becki: Do I like music? Imagine if I was like “No I hate it” *laughs* It would be so depressing ‘cause I’ve devoted my life to it.
Here’s what I will say: I really like music, but something I potentially like is music as symbolism. If it’s technically immaculate but it doesn’t have that symbolic element to it, it’s gonna mean less to me. So music means a lot to me because it’s a really effective way of conveying a symbolic mode of storytelling, but music itself can be a symbol too. Obviously certain chord progressions or certain textures or whatever it might be have come to symbolise certain emotions across human history, and that’s something interesting to think about.
But yeah, I love more than just music.
Ez: Now into the final section. What is your connection to Art As Catharsis?
Becki: I released an ambient record, my most recent record, The Halo is Shapeless, in 2023. I think Lachlan found me through The Republic of Paradise and he said to me “If you ever make anything dark and gritty like this, or if you release more ambient music, hit me up ‘cause I’d love to release it”, and so we did.
Ez: So it was that simple, that straightforward.
Becki: Yeah. Lachlan’s always been someone who… I guess we have a common interest in various spiritual things and we can have a yap about that, so it’s nice to be part of that community that he’s created.
Ez: And you’re playing the AAC show in Melbourne. And I believe it’s a few days before The Bendigo closes down, so it’s sort of gonna be a strange feeling, but still celebratory.
Becki: I didn’t actually know that. That’s kind of bittersweet.
I’m excited for the opportunity to see a bunch of the bands I’ve known of through the label but not had the chance to see before, but especially to see Kat play live again ‘cause she’s been on a bit of a break from music, and she’s been telling me all sorts of things that have me intrigued.
It’s very fucking cool, and I’ve heard her say her set for the fifteen-year anniversary is gonna make everyone cry, so you will come ready to cry.
Ez: *laughs* will you also be making people cry then?
Becki: That’s not my intention. I think it’s gonna be more of a transcendental cleanse. That’s the ambition for my set.
Ez: Why do you think a label like Art As Catharsis has been able to survive and keep going for as long as it has?
Becki: I feel like… there’s a lot of factors that play into this. Everyone who runs it has a lot of dedication, but also probably they’ve had enough financial stability to not take a step back in these hard economic times. I realise that’s a boring answer in a way, but I think that’s just a practical truth.
It’s a very well-oiled machine in terms of how it runs. I think there’s enough delegation between the people involved. I think that’s a really important part of keeping something like that running.
I think there’s a strong sense of that helps to keep the vibes good, you know?
Ez: And lastly, what does Art As Catharsis mean to you?
Becki: I think it’s a very aptly-named. For me it’s been a home for music that I’ve made to experience catharsis myself. And it’s a space that I have been lucky to share with artists like Kat who I really respect. It’s a space where I’ve felt very believed in, and I appreciate that a lot.