New Album Release
Sowden House
The worlds of jazz, cinema, and video-game storytelling collide in Freyja Garbett’s extraordinary new album Sowden House. Originating from a collaboration with Brendan McNamara, who is the founder of Team Bondi and writer/director of the acclaimed video game L.A. Noire, Sowden House began as the score for an immersive VR game set within Los Angeles’s infamous architectural landmark of the same name. The house, designed by Lloyd Wright (son of Frank Lloyd Wright) in a dramatic Mayan Revival style, once belonged to the mysterious Dr George Hodel, long rumoured to be linked to the Black Dahlia murder. Garbett’s music, conceived for this imagined world of shadow, memory, and intrigue, has now emerged as a cinematic, stand-alone album: a sonic journey through mood, atmosphere, and the blurred line between reality and imagination.
Across the album’s lush soundscape, Garbett blurs the boundaries between jazz, orchestral composition, psychedelic funk, and cinematic ambience. Drawing inspiration from the psychological thrillers of the 1970s and the house’s ominous grandeur, she crafts both noir mystery and spectral beauty. Snowden House features two distinct ensembles: the groove-driven Sydney funk collective Mister Ott, and a large hybrid ensemble of some of Australia’s most accomplished jazz, classical, and contemporary musicians. The sessions, recorded at Golden Retriever Studios and Rancom St Studios in Sydney, were engineered and mixed by Richard Belkner and Simon Berkelman, and mastered by Lachlan Carrick. The result is a record that feels expansive and cinematic, yet deeply personal. It is a sound world of layered harmonies, rhythmic experimentation, and hypnotic orchestrations.
Debut album
'Maya'
Art As Catharsis is proud to announce the release of Freyja Garbett’s debut record MAYA – a spectacular, immersive waltz through rich jazz laden soundscapes.
Garbett’s heady compositions draws influence from a vast range of styles and musicians. A graduate of the Berklee College of Music, she lists pianists and composers such as Fred Hersch, Gerald Clayton and Maria Schneider as critical influences to her music, along with the likes of Flying Lotus, J Dilla and Snarky Puppy.
“The pieces from my debut album are an exploration of an electro-acoustic approach to jazz composition and improvisation,” begins Garbett. “These compositions are springboards for improvisation and creativity. An added element to my approach is that all of the musicians can manipulate their instrument’s sound drastically - the arrangements of the pieces can be expanded on, therefore creating ambient textures of the studio produced music that I listen to. On stage, we have the facility to offer audiences a fiery multi-dimensional performance.”
