Hey Mabel! Could you tell us a little about yourself, your art and your music?
Hey! Thanks for having me! I am a 21 year old DJ, music producer, and visual artist broadly interested in primal and animalistic instinctual behaviour and urges. Art and music for me have been a strong and sustainable creative outlet my entire life. My music entails hypnotic and bass filled soundscapes mixed with energetic broken beats. I play around at various clubs and events, more recently, I’ve been producing too.
Visual art for me was always second nature. I have always felt free in visual expression and the nonsense you can make with paint. I am about to finish my degree in visual art at VCA and am currently working as an artist and DJ.
How did you get into djing? Have you found it a smooth road as a woman entering a very male-dominated industry?
I grew up around musicians and was always confused about my lack of interest in traditional classical instruments. I was more drawn to filtration of sound and sampling, for example, when I got my hands on a Nintendo DSI at 13 which had the ability to record and manipulate sound with an array of basic filters and pitch/tempo modulation. I always thought it was a good gag sneakily recording conversations with my parents and making their voices sound bizarre and irritating. At 16 I got my hands on a Traktor S4 controller and didn’t leave it alone for the next few years until I could start playing in clubs at 18. I became hooked on dancing and making people move, it truly felt innate.
In terms of my journey, I feel like it is unavoidable to be a political beacon as a woman. Coming into the industry I endured my fair share of shouting, undermining, side-lining, and straight up ignoring that was uncomfortably repetitive and alienating. I had always been familiar with it in such a male dominated setting, a bias for men is undeniable in a world still learning the best ways to empower women and people struggling with visibility. Engaging in my interests has always felt like a performance where I couldn’t make mistakes and it has been frustrating. Being sidelined to the more lighthearted, "feminine" slots compared to all my male counterparts was always an issue I had felt was deeply rooted in the scene and underestimated my value as an artist. However, my experiences and identity all in all don’t affect or change my abilities to play and produce music. As much as I am aware it affects how I am perceived it is tricky dropping the divisiveness that comes with being a woman. I love all my male friends in the industry who are incredibly supportive of me and all the other supportive women and people who are straight up killing it and making some unbelievable tunes, they are always my inspiration. I just want people to hear my noise!.
I have been following you for a while now, and know you’re an electro girl through and through. Has this been your passion all along, or has it changed over time?
Electro! Yes! Always a filthy sound that manages to creep into every set. I actually used to hate it when I first started so I’m glad I matured into it quickly. I started with tech-house in my earliest days and slowly started enjoying a more broken beat the more I got into it. Electro for me was always so loud and unapologetically dirty so it definitely became a big staple for the Mabel brand. I always felt like I was really letting people know I was present with such a stimulating sound. It really makes people move in an unhinged, animalistic way that created a wild atmosphere. I also began exploring other broken and bass filled genres once my love for electro properly solidified. I now have journeyed slightly from electro and am loving dubstep, bassline, jungle, but then also minimal tech-house again for some reason. I think tech-house will always be one of my favourites because of how versatile and broad it is as well as it’s immediate reciprocation on a pumping dance floor. At the end of the day I’m obsessed with anything wobbly and hypnotic, it really encompasses the euphoria of getting completely lost in sound.
You’re a bit of a jack of all trades, creatively speaking. You used to tattoo, you paint and DJ on top of that. Do you feel like your art connects to your music? Or are these separate outlets for you?
Everything is connected for sure! It’s actually usually quite subconscious for me because if I plan any artworks or songs/sets I am way too aware of every little move I make and it quickly becomes stressful and unenjoyable. Painting is similar to producing because of the constant modulation of layers. My paintings are likely to have many other paintings underneath them before I leave them alone so you can get a sense of texture and depth. My music draws many parallels as I am just messing around with sounds until they spawn textures that were deeper than the last. I want the result of all the little layers merging together to be like looking into a pond and falling in head first, an experience that is all around you and inside you. It’s still something I am a while off mastering especially with music as I am still very new to producing but so many other artists are magicians in that way and it is incredibly inspirational and motivating.
You have a new EP coming out/that has just come out. We’d love to know the process of that, and what has inspired it.
Yep! My new two track EP ‘Unterwasser’ came out on bandcamp not long ago which was exciting. It is my first EP exploring my very much self taught and limited skills in Ableton Lite which was a huge challenge with all it’s limitations. I had my amazing friend Jaimie (JASA) master it and I was extremely happy with the result! I started on the first track (Unterwasser) earlier in the year when I first delved into the deep abyss of dubstep. I was really inspired by the warped swelling soundscapes that really flew around your head. Every vocal is segments of Trixie Mattel explaining the rules of Drag Race All Stars. Her and Katya were always my favourites on Drag Race. I tend to obsess over vocals and how much I can reintroduce them as their own melodies or instruments, I also repeat them a lot because I like the hypnotic element of a loop. For the second track, 'Atmung’, I was mainly inspired by the break-tech queen Roza Terenzi and how she effortlessly mixes breakbeat with tech-house to create her own staple sound. I attempted manually writing a breakbeat pattern based off of one of her tunes and after a lot of frustration managed to figure it out somewhat. The vocals in this track are miss Naomi Campbell. She encompasses a fairly iconic attitude so of course she needed to cop a feature. In the end the whole EP took about 8-9 months of messing around and finally released it and I am very proud of myself for finally getting it out.
Do you have a highlight of your DJ career so far?
For me the absolute ecstasy of DJing has to be seeing large amounts of people go wild to your playlist that you have put together just for them. As a DJ you can be like, I like this song now you all have to listen to it, and it’s amazing. My biggest stand out highlight has to be the doof me and my friends ran a few months back where I got to play to people in my favourite setting, outside. Seeing people unleash in such a primal setting is sick. It wasn’t until after I finished that I had a total of three different people report back to me that they had actually run into the bushes during my set for emergency poos… I had made three different people do that. That was easily the most amazing thing to hear people weren’t even able to control their bowels and I will always hold that up high as one of my biggest achievements loud and proud.
Are you looking forward to playing more as summer comes around, and where can we see you?
I am so keen for the season of dancing to come! It has been long deserved and I feel like my sound has matured and grown with some time away. There’s events coming up that I am excited to be a part of such as Slow Burn, Handle Returns, and Arvo Girls which is just to name a few! Heaps more is in the works and I am enthusiastic to be submerged in the scene once again. Thank you so much again for having me!
Interview by Lucia Morris.