Carolyn Schofield

Melbourne electronic musician Carolyn Schofield, aka Fia Fiell, combines her profound practical and theoretical chops as a pianist and composer with a most modern and perceptive ear for stretching out the orbit of millennial electronic music constructs. As a live performer, Carolyn plays and processes multiple synths in real time to create hauntingly ethereal, unsettling and other-worldly soundscapes, a sound which formed the basis of her first release, “A Hair, A Heap” on Melbourne label Nice Music in 2016. Since then, Carolyn’s unique live shows have seen her invited to perform at festivals including Freedom Time, Inner Varnika, Obsidian Festival and Melbourne Fashion Week, as well as her own headline performance in multichannel sound presented by Play On at Melbourne Music Week, which was commissioned as a site-specific work at the Melbourne Docklands’ Mission to Seafarers Dome. 

Heavily influenced by the rhythms and movements of the natural world as well as musical romanticism, Carolyn often explores meditative and subtly-shifting sonic landscapes in her music, with improvisation forming a large part of her compositional processes and live performances. She has an unnatural knack for wielding the hi-res vapour clouds which form and nebulize around uneasy chords and melodic cycles, perhaps conjuring a notion of childlike wonderment and trepidation in the face of an unmapped universe around us.

Carolyn also performs in a difficult-to-categorise dance music duo, Rolling Mass, together with beatmaker and grindcore drummer Max Kohane. Their debut EP, Prime Unity (released on L.A.’s Brain Dead Records last year) explored influences ranging from disco and funk to house, drone and distorted techno. Carolyn has also just joined art-pop indie band Jaala on synths, and will be touring Europe together with singer/guitarist Cosima Pay and drummer Maria Moles following the release of Jaala’s new album, Joonya Spirit, on Bedroom Suck in April.