Grey is Ground​ is a swirling, emotional synth-pop album of rare complexity and emotion, featuring Slater’s extraordinary voice atop churning rhythms and galactic synths.

Featuring keyboardist/producer ​Barney McAll​ (Sia, Daniel Merriweather, Aloe Blacc) and drummer ​Simon Barker​, with special guests beatmaker ​Emefern​ and trumpeter ​Phil Slater​.

From the first bars of ​Gian Slater’​s new album ​Grey is Ground​, there is an unexpected serenity to the vocal melodies – given the restless, complex grooves underneath. Slater’s crystalline voice is unhurried as the accompanying rhythms boil and shift. The juxtaposition is deliberate. Musically and lyrically, Grey Is Ground welcomes ambiguity; patiently waiting for beauty, empathy and comfort to be revealed.
Vocalist / composer / multi-instrumentalist Gian Slater is well-known in jazz and contemporary music circles both internationally and in ​her native Australia​. She has long been a singer’s singer: an individualist whose vocal artistry and sophisticated songwriting have forged a creatively adventurous career. As director of the acclaimed improvising vocal ensemble ​Invenio​, Slater has pushed the envelope of choral music in Australia through a series of acclaimed albums, commissions, theatre and dance works, working with pop, classical, jazz and electronic artists (including Biophilia Records stablemate Linda May Han Oh​’s ​Aventurine)​ . As an improviser she has collaborated with Ben Monder, Theo Bleckmann, Will Vinson and many others in the US, as well as Australian music luminaries Paul Grabowsky, Lior, Andrea Keller and the Australian Art Orchestra.
The musical world found in ​Grey Is Ground​ was sparked by a performance Slater gave with two old friends at the famed ​Sydney Opera House​. The singer convened pianist, producer and spiritual guide of the Australian jazz scene Barney McAll​ with master drummer ​Simon Barker​, forming an Australian contemporary music ‘superband’. The success of the concert prompted the singer to write an album of music for the new trio. Slater began composing the

material during her first pregnancy, a life-change that prompted an emotional theme for the work. “I was pregnant with my first child as I wrote the title song ‘Grey Is Ground’, which started the whole project,” Slater recalls, ​“bringing a child into the world helped me to embrace uncertainty, and to recognize the unknown as essential.”
With this feeling, Slater was compelled to explore a new mode of songwriting, deliberately seeking uncharted creative territory. Inspiration came from the complex rhythmic language of drummer Barker. “My music has always been led by harmony, followed by melody,” she explains. “Rhythm has been an intuitive ‘addition’ to these elements, maybe even an afterthought. ​With this album, rhythm began the writing process for every song. I used rhythmic patterns and cycles that were unfamiliar; I was finding melodies that could float amidst the uncertainty.​” Slater leaned into the ambiguity, seeing it as a starting point not just for the songs, but for everything.
On this title track ​“Grey is Ground”​, Slater is setting out the mission statement for the album. Accompanied by the emotive drum programming of another rhythmic adventurer, IDM savant ​Emefern​, Slater implores herself to ​hold on to the question,​ or remain in the ambiguity. “I am reminding myself, and maybe you, that abiding with doubt is ok,’ says the singer, “It is ok to not have the answer, or an opinion, or a stance. In fact, it is the place we all begin, the ground to all our thoughts. Uncertainty and curiosity are so often linked with empathy and kindness.” ​The track opens with a Dave Smith Prophet’s warm, nostalgic synth chords pillowing Slater’s unadorned melody like a Kate Bush ballad​. Drum machines tumble into the field, eventually offering a backbeat for Slater’s chorus, a resolution for the album: ​I know where there is mystery there is love all around.​ The song folds into a heavenly coda Sufjan Stevens would relish, where Slater paints a milky way of celestial vocals over Emefern’s softly scattered breakbeat polyrhythms.
Slater’s relationship with producer Barney McAll goes back over 10 years. Their first collaboration was ​2009’s ​Sylent Running,​ atriumphantavant-poprecordwhichbecameacultfavoriteforitssongcraftandkineticbeats.​Over drummer Simon Barker’s churning grooves, McAll and Slater construct layers of synths and Brian Wilson-like choirs of stacked vocals​. Slater’s voice is serene and buoyant on the waves of sound; beautiful but not precious; vulnerable but potent, high and breathy but full of maturity and knowing. It sounds as if each pure note of her astounding 3-octave range is syphoned from a hidden torrent of emotional power and self-possession. Most remarkable is what is missing - Slater’s voice is entirely free of cliche or affectation. With none of the hammed sultriness or squeezed vowels of the ingenue, no cheap melisma or cloying vibrato, ​Slater’s directness of sound is rare and disarming​. She seems to have transcended any trappings of vocal style or fashion. Hers is a clean channel from heart to sound.
Grey Is Ground​ is at once fizzing, technicolor synth-epic and poignant singer-songwriter confessional.​ In Slater’s beautiful, complicated world, optimism and realism cohabitate, uncertainty and resolve blur. Slater can make the everyday appear galactic, or the sublime handheld. And amid the complex rhythms and catchy choruses, Slater is trying, in her words, to “hold on to the question”, to see if doubt might be a doorway to love. “The unfamiliar rhythms feel like the ground in this music – earthy, complex, and mysterious,” says the singer, “and my voice walks across this ground – trying to understand what I’m walking on. And to me this ground – the starting place and the returning place – is ambiguous, or grey.”