Carolyn Schofield

Biography

Emerging Melbourne composer and electronic musician Fia Fiell, aka Carolyn Schofield, combines her profound practical and theoretical chops as a pianist with a most modern and perceptive ear for stretching out the orbit of millennial electronic music constructs. As a live performer, Carolyn plays and processes multiple synths in real time to create hauntingly ethereal, unsettling and other-worldly soundscapes, a sound which formed the basis of her first release, “A Hair, A Heap” on Melbourne label Nice Music in 2016. Since then, Carolyn’s unique live shows have seen her invited to perform at festivals including Freedom Time, Inner Varnika, Obsidian Festival and Melbourne Fashion Week, as well as her own headline performance in multichannel sound presented by Play On at Melbourne Music Week, commissioned as a site-specific work at the Docklands’ Mission to Seafarers Dome. Other notable commissions as an emerging composer include a piece for percussion and electronics for the Arts Centre’s 5x5x5 program in 2017, as well as a forthcoming piece for chamber ensemble, commissioned by the University of Melbourne to be performed as part of the Melbourne Recital Centre’s Local Heroes concert series.

Heavily influenced by the rhythms and movements of the natural world as well as musical romanticism, Carolyn often explores meditative, emotive and subtly-shifting sonic landscapes in her music, with improvisation forming a large part of her compositional processes and live performances. She has an unnatural knack for wielding the hi-res vapour clouds which form and nebulize around uneasy chords and melodic cycles, perhaps conjuring a notion of childlike wonderment and trepidation in the face of an unmapped universe around us.

Composer website: https://www.facebook.com/fiafiell

Featured Works

At The First Clear Word, for electronics.

A ‘romantic’ synthesiser piece formed around two improvisations, emerging from the simple repetition of close bass sine waves.

Featured in Electronic Waves (April 2019), curated by Aidan Maizels.