Rising star Gordi: 'Love can be a complicated thing. Especially for a queer person'

In my final weeks of medical school, I learnt how to certify death. You begin the exam by observing the deceased, calling their name and waiting for a response. You listen to their chest – for a heartbeat, for the sound of their breath. You are searching for the absence of life. For utter quiet.

When I learnt this exam, I was struck by the skin. How in the moments after death, it toughens into a hard waxy exterior. It made me think of plasticine. I have vivid memories of playing with plasticine – or Play-Doh – as a child. Sitting at the kitchen table pressing the gooey substance into different shapes, stretching it thinly and pushing it back together. When I would leave it out overnight, I would find it hardened and waxy in the morning. Like it was finally able to set in place.

Thinking of this memory, I stood in a small hospital room, searching for the absence of life, and wondering if we are like plasticine in death, then maybe we are in life, too. What stretches us thin? What forces us back together? What are the different shapes we contort ourselves into? I wandered down an invisible path, reflecting on the moments in my life that have transformed me.

Grief. I am often witnessing grief. As a medical professional, I am privy to many people’s worst day. I am the bearer of bad news. I am the one who silently retreats, leaving the patient to be comforted by friends and family. These roles are uncomfortable but familiar, like my Doc Martens whose soles have worn through. But the pandemic was different. Because of strict lockdown measures, no visitors were allowed to the hospital. So when I told a man that his brain cancer had grown back at such a rapid rate that it was inoperable, and instead of going home to recover, he would be going home to die, he had no one by his side. I sat with him and held his hand as he called his daughter on FaceTime to tell her. She was enraged, confused, terrified, devastated. At the end of the day I sat in my car, overcome with the feelings I so tirelessly suppressed, unable to turn the key in the ignition.

Love. Can be a complicated thing. Especially for a queer person. For me, coming out in my mid-20s was a complete rebuilding of my inner life. I had spent the previous decade in a myriad of different shapes, not consciously feeling unlike myself but accepting that the spectrum of life and love might be narrower than I thought.

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Then I fell in love. It was like the subs in the bass suddenly kicked in, like lights muted by a dimmer switch became white hot. It completely transformed how I saw the world and myself within it. Queerness came as a shock to me, and what followed was a wrestle to self-acceptance. If pride was the angel on my shoulder, then the devil was shame. I had so much learning and unlearning to do, brain rewiring and expectation adjusting. What guided me was understanding the substance of who I was, and that who and how I loved would alter that as much as I wanted it to.

I knew the title of this album before I made it. I began writing at the end of 2021, as the peak of the pandemic was nearing the rearview. I had found my creativity entirely stifled for 18 months, feeling as existential about songwriting as I did about the world facing a virus. I flew to Sydney and set up in a performance space called Phoenix Central Park – it’s a staggering, curved, timber-panelled room in the heart of Chippendale with a shiny, black Fazioli piano in the centre.

Every morning, I would carefully open its lid, gently brush the keys and hear their reverberant tone echo around the cavernous space. I had a small collection of guitars, amplifiers, pedals and synthesizers, and I set them up in a circle adjoining the piano. A tiny arena. I began by finding the spine of a song – the bones, the core, the soul – fundamental pieces that I could build on. Sometimes a drum beat, a bass line, guitar chords, a vocal hook. I would record it, and play it on loop through the speakers to fill the atmosphere.

Over the top of these spines, I wrote Like Plasticine. The album came together in two weeks, each week six months apart. In those weeks, I dug into a well, where I found the stories of a challenging and beautiful period of life. I wrote about the ecstasy and the agony of change. True, unshakable resilience.

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