ANNIE HAMILTON

from Come Play With Magazine #20

by Come Play With Me CIC

TOVE STYRKE

AWAY FROM THE NOISE ANNIE HAMILTON

IT'S ALL CREATIVE ART...

My name is Annie Hamilton and I'm a musician, artist and designer based in Sydney, Australia. I've just released my debut album, "the future is here but it feels kinda like the past", and I also run my own eponymous clothing label. I've spent the last few years chipping away at both music and fashion after launching both projects in 2017 following a stint in Iceland as an artistin-residence. to creativity - I love making things, whether that be music, clothes, art, photographs, food... to me it is all the same creative energy going into whatever project I'm working on. Since I was a kid, I've always loved sewing and making myself weird costumes - giant fairy wings, elaborate headpieces - give me any excuse to make a costume and I will always go way over the top. As my music has evolved over the last couple of years, I've started making more extravagant outfits and costumes for my videos and live shows.

Throughout the course of writing the album, I realised that bats were starting to emerge as a bit of a recurring image, weaving their way through the songs... This wasn't really intentional - I tend to write as a way of navigating, documenting and processing my experiences, and I guess I just happened to have a lot of experiences with bats over the last two years, as bizarre as that sounds. Every night at sunset, thousands of fruit bats fly over my house on their nightly ritual, so my nightly ritual became going outside at dusk to sit and watch them fly over.

They started to take on new meanings for me, symbolising cycles, the passing of time, the way we try to find patterns in life in an attempt to make sense of it all these things that I was trying to explore in my writing. There was also a period last year when I was living in an old house in the Snowy Mountains that had a nest of tiny microbats in the lounge room wall. Every night the bats would come out of the nest and fly around in circles in the lounge room - I had to stand on the kitchen table and catch them in a tea towel to release them outside (fact is truly stranger than fiction) - this scene is now immortalised in my song Bad Trip. After writing a few lyrical references to bats I started drawing them and using them as visual symbols, and made a giant glittery pair of bat wings to wear for a few of my music videos. I also designed a top with black glittery sequin bats flying across the chest to wear in my Exist music video. I love when these symbols and metaphors emerge organically from the music - I didn't have to sit down and plan out what the imagery of the album would be - they just naturally fluttered their way in.