Chamberwoman – Slow Cosmic Demise

Independent psych-folk artist Chamberwoman (Natalie Cardoza) releases her debut album Slow Cosmic Demise, a body of work written and recorded over the last four years of living in Lutruwita (Tasmania).

Following the release of the title track, the album arrives as a document of modern life’s emotional weather, moving through passion, expectation, hope and decay.

Chamberwoman describes the record in three words: “Emotional time bomb.”

The album’s focus track, ‘All The Way’, is set inside an argument and begins in the aftermath of one. It captures the moment where compromise stops being a solution and love becomes a choice with consequences, asking what it means to meet someone fully, rather than splitting the distance. “If you love someone you will cross over the line and meet them ‘all the way’ on their side,” Chamberwoman says, “instead of it having to always be each person coming a little distance to meet in the middle.” ‘All The Way’ is released alongside an accompanying music video.

Made through a deliberately non-linear process, Slow Cosmic Demise was discovered as it was undertaken. After moving again to a new part of the country, Chamberwoman developed a new approach to songwriting, experimenting more with synthesisers and keyboards while still holding onto the foundation of folk and guitar-based music. The record was coproduced and engineered with her long-time musical collaborator Cornelius Cooper.

“I did not have one select process in writing, arranging or composing,” Chamberwoman says. “Within it I know I just felt completely unencumbered to write about anything and everything, because you have nothing to lose in your first collection of songs.” For Chamberwoman, the most vivid memories sit in the earliest moments of a song taking shape, the first murmurings of melody that arrive in mundane situations, before repetition and work take over.

If there is an overarching thread running through Slow Cosmic Demise, it is, in Chamberwoman’s words, the mettle of the human spirit. Whether it is a call to connect with our roots in ‘Part of Me’, the dedication and sacrifice of love in ‘Greater Cost’, or the existential reckoning of ‘Slow Cosmic Demise’, the album holds the strange unity of being alive at the same time, in the same mess.

Originally from Brisbane, Chamberwoman taught herself guitar and songwriting in her early twenties while living in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) for much of the decade. After relocating to Tasmania in 2022, she began Chamberwoman, a name with multiple personal meanings. “A chamber can be so many things, somewhere you stow away belongings or the four chambers of the heart,” she says. It also nods to chamber music, written for intimate gatherings, and to the need to feel close to others.

Since launching the project, Chamberwoman has performed at Dark Mofo, including supporting Folk Bitch Trio at Albert Hall. Tasmanian audiences can catch her live for the album launch on October 31 at The Grand Poobah Kissing Room in Hobart, followed by in-store performances at Avenue Records (Launceston) on November 7 and Suffragette Records (Hobart, date TBA).

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