Gazelle Twin

Kingdom Come gathers three pieces from the audio-visual show of the same name by Gazelle Twin, the project of the British composer and producer Elizabeth Bernholz. The performance was first commissioned by the FutureEverything festival in Manchester in 2016 and then toured Europe. It takes its title and its subject from J. G. Ballard's last novel, Kingdom Come (2006): the rituals and dangers of suburban consumerism, retail parks and shopping malls. Bernholz conceived the piece and wrote the music, but she does not appear on stage. Where her 2014 album Unflesh turned the body inside out, The Vinyl Factory wrote, Kingdom Come x-rays the outside world. The label issued this EP in February 2017, around her performance at CTM Festival in Berlin on 3 February. It belongs to the Fear Anger Love series made with the festival, alongside records by Moor Mother, Chino Amobi and N.M.O. During CTM all four could be heard at The Vinyl Factory's listening station in the Kunstquartier Bethanien.

On stage two vocalists, Natalie Sharp and Stuart Warwick, dressed between office wear and gym kit, alternate singing with running on two treadmills. Behind them run films by Chris Turner and Tash Tung of car parks, brutalist estates and malls, in six chapters. Bernholz imagined indistinguishable people with no identity and no freedom, living on a loop in the transactional present Ballard described. The score uses samples and live vocal manipulation. Bernholz told The Quietus in 2017 that she wanted "eerie, religious choral purity". She described cold, almost robotic chanting over a deep, churning energy that ends in grunts and screams. Side A holds Metro. Side B pairs I Consume Only, whose video by Turner and Tung appeared with the release, and Hallowed. The cover is by Jonathan Barnbrook, designer of David Bowie's Blackstar, who took the track and video of Metro as his starting point. All three pieces later returned on the full Kingdom Come studio album, issued digitally by Anti-Ghost Moon Ray Records in November 2017.

This is the original Vinyl Factory 12" EP (VF256), on black vinyl in a limited edition of 300 copies, with a sleeve designed by Jonathan Barnbrook.