Unnatural
Australian Gothic Meets Queer Revolution
Sound Designer
Blue Room Theatre, Main Season 2024
Unnatural unravels the transformative experience of queerness by traveling through six journeys of metamorphosis. From the Eldritch to the evangelical, Holland Brooks’ playwrighting debut rips open the Australian Gothic to paint a visual story of queer reckoning, redemption, and reclamation.
Sometimes the experience of queerness demands a haunted house.
This work was all about the queer, the uncanny, and the not-quite-human – and I tried to find a balance between a soundscapes built of natural sounds and deeply mechanical ones – the contrast between white noise through a sea shell, and melodic autotune.
“Each design element within Unnatural is impressively enmeshed with not only each other but also the stories themselves. Abi Russell’s sound design subtly underpins the narratives, expertly building tension where needed, ebbing and flowing seamlessly.”
– Holly Ferguson, Magazine 6000
Working on Unnatural was an exercise in restraint. Working with a script that held itself so well that it could easily exist design-less, it was about creating space for it to breathe, and supporting the actors in building pace and tension.
I worked a lot with the impact of negative space within the sound design for this – using seemingly diegetic sounds, such as white noise or a faint electrical buzzing that are barely noticeable, but when suddenly taken away, the absence is felt jarringly. Using these diegetic sounds, I made a tension filled soundscape to assist the actors in building the climax of the first act;
Ghostly Ambience, and Mechanical Echoes
Hear how I used melodic refrains, vocal harmonies, and autotuned echoes in The Unnatural sound design.
