Thembi Soddell

Thembi Soddell is a sound artist best known for their powerful acousmatic performances and installations in darkness of “startling, even hallucinatory, intensity” (New Zealand Listener). Their primary tool is the sampler, generating sounds from field recordings, found objects, instrument textures and voice – abstracted beyond recognition – to offer audiences intense encounters with the psychological impact of sound and darkness. 

Their last album, Love Songs (ROOM40, 2018), was praised for its “innovative approach to form” (Fluid Radio) and “fearless conceptual framework” (Self-Titled Magazine), its launch winning a Green Room Award for Contemporary Sound Performance. Its companion installation, Held Down, Expanding, premiered at MONA-FOMA, becoming a finalist for an APRA-AMCOS Art Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Music.  

In 2019 Soddell completed a practice-based PhD, A Dense Mass of Indecipherable Fear: The Experiential (Non)Narration of Trauma and Madness through Acousmatic Sound (RMIT University), advancing an innovative approach to critiquing the mental health system through sound and lived experience. Their practice has continued with the exploration of lived experience of trauma and madness through a transgenerational lens. 

Soddell has also performed and exhibited extensively across Australia, New Zealand and Europe, guest-curated for the National Gallery of Victoria (2013), mentored through SIGNAL (2019, 2020, 2022), completed a Regional Arts Victoria Fellowship (2021), and published research in Organised Sound (2020), Disclaimer (2021), and The Big Anxiety: Taking Care of Mental Health in Times of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2022). Soddell is of Polish/Anglo-Celtic heritage, born and living on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, regional Victoria.