Holly Childs & Gediminas Žygus’s Gnarled Roots is the follow up to Hydrangea, released in 2020, the next in a series of works exploring and deconstructing aspects of the cinematic, politics, and fiction.

The intercontinental collaboration began in a series of presentations shown across Europe and Australia. This latest iteration was seeded in site-specific performance “Hydrangea 2: Gnarled Roots of a Creation Theory” – a reference to the fabled PhD thesis by an Australian businessman claiming to be anonymous Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto. Twenty-first century mythology is at the centre of the album’s broad and complex narrative, with the September 11 Twin Tower attacks its origin story.

“We started working on Gnarled Roots through doing a lot of research on 9/11 and our experience of it,” says Žygus. “Looking at it as this cataclysmic, highly theatrical event that has had an effect on many of the narratives of the world since.”

The most explicit allusion to the 2001 global incident is on “Turns to Dust”. Lurching bass distortion and an uncanny harp melody buffets Elif Satanaya Özbay’s query, “Where did the buildings go?” with reference to mechanical engineer and 9/11 conspiracy theorist Judy Wood. The droning of album opener “Two Trees”, takes New York’s World Trade Center as a point of departure into exploring binaries and duplication, puzzles and paradoxes, collapse and destruction.

The other voices on Gnarled Roots also include Marijn Degenaar, Mark Prendergast, and Stephanie Overs, most of whom resume their roles in the expanding narrative of 2020’s Hydrangea. They come to inhabit the same space across creative dimensions. “The forest in Gnarled Roots is increasing in complexity the longer it grows,” says Childs. “In Hydrangea, there wasn’t even a forest yet, just some hydrangea bushes in a void.”

“Through our research we got to a more general topic of doubles and twins,” says Childs. “Belief and Knowledge are twin characters, representing twin information forms or modes of understanding the world.”

Gnarled Roots explores contradiction, and junctures at which manifold options are presented, but where no clearly preferable path exists. Ongoing collaborators Metahaven have designed assorted album covers for multiple platforms, while the composite branching of reality is notably explored on “Forking”. Özbay’s persona, Belief, describes coming to a fork in a road: “Do you choose option A or option B?” This is an echo of the use of the hydrangea—a flower that blooms either blue or pink, depending on the composition of the soil in which it grows—on Childs and Žygus’s titular first album. It’s a symbol of the latent possibilities contained within each scenario and material.

This expansive, interdisciplinary project is defined by its relationship to cinema, as much as by its relationship to music. Žygus’s production mirrors video editing techniques and film theory. The materials used include an industry standard orchestral sound library for film scores and a software synth made in the Dutch gabber community, composed and arranged to moving-image clips ranging from Pride and Prejudice to K-pop music videos. Psychedelic folk, club-adjacent chamber music, post-classical and sci-fi all bleed into the sonic environments of Gnarled Roots.

A subterranean flipside to last year’s Hydrangea, this second release by the cross-cultural duo dives into some of the myths, fictions and fables that shape societies. “If Hydrangea was an atmosphere,” says Childs. “Gnarled Roots is the earth.”

Holly Childs is a writer and artist in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Alongside Gediminas Žygus, in 2020 she released Hydrangea, an album exploring narrative fracture, reality bubbles, and intimacy. She is the author of two books: No Limit published by Hologram and Danklands published by Arcadia Missa. She is a former Associate Artist at Jacuzzi (Amsterdam), Gertrude Contemporary studio holder (Melbourne), an alumna of The New Normal at Strelka Institute (Moscow), and holds a Masters in Film, Design and Politics from Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam).

Gediminas Žygus is a Lithuanian artist working within the fields of sound, film and performance. Their practice focuses on the experience of selfhood in the post-anthropocene. Gediminas Žygus has presented works and collaborations at Barbican Centre, Berghain, La Biennale di Venezia, HKW, The Kitchen, Centre Pompidou, Unsound and others.