Genevieve Von Black Music

My first solo track is releasing 7 February – presave here : https://ffm.to/ghostsarespeaking

Isolated by storms in a cottage off a wild Lutruwita/Tasmania coast, my DNA rattled with a chorale from my great great great great grandfather and his family, one of 9 families brought out from Cornwall to work hard in that very place in 1857. I had evidence of them in the bureaucracy of the colony. I know their height, hair colour, the shape of their faces and who was of ample figure or of sinister expression. But when I looked for them in the angry waves, sparkling glass middens on the shore, and narrow sheep tracks under creaking trees, I felt their individual songs were lost. But in the nights I spent there, I heard tragic, bitter, wondrous and fair things from them as wind whipped around us, birds flew backwards and the fire crackled in the grate of a house their hands may have helped repair. 

This single is a recording of an improvisation on site from one of those nights – channelling the cold storm, the place, my ancestors and my own self into a ghostly music. It is the title track from the upcoming album of the same name, to be released on the Blunderbuss Record Co label on 30 May 2025.

Cover artwork Dark Trees by Joanne Faulkner. Album art Matthew Syres.

For fans of: Keith Jarrett, Brian Eno/Cluster, Alister Spence, Vangelis, Christine Ott