Tash Sultana, Melbourne musician: Notion, Jungle, Flow State, Salvation
Tash Sultana has come a long way since her days playing to passers-by in the Bourke Street Mall.
At a busy section of Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall in December 2015, a guitarist stands beside four stacked milk crates with an amplifier, a nest of cables, powerboards and effects pedals at her feet. She wears a yellow cap, pale pink loose-fitting shirt, baggy pants and white sneakers while holding an aqua-coloured instrument. By using the pedals to layer and loop her guitar parts, she patiently builds a sound bed before approaching the microphone with a rich voice that easily scales wondrous heights.
From time to time, green-and-white trams glide past just metres from where she stands. Lost in the arrangement of a song named Notion, she pays them no mind. With tattoos curling up her forearms, rings on most of her fingers and wild brown hair, she comes across as a person who is deeply invested in her art.
She performs as if in a reverie, as if there’s no audience; as if she would be doing exactly this somewhere in the world even if nobody were there to watch her. It is rare to witness something so extraordinarily unselfconscious. Prodding at the pedals on the ground beneath her, the singer and songwriter appears as immersed in music as any artist has ever been.
Halfway through, she drops to her knees to play a dirty electric guitar solo, adding yet another layer of intrigue to this transmission from another world being broadcast on an otherwise ordinary day in Melbourne. To doubt her in this moment would require a superhuman amount of cynicism. Much easier to just watch, eyes and ears open, as this startling, vibrant human fills the space around her with joyous sounds.
For much of the seven-minute performance, a thin man in black has been listening from across the tram line. He stands stock still, entranced. Periodically, he glances around with a sense of disbelief, to see whether anyone else is paying attention to this blizzard of sound.
In the final bars, a tram bell dings in salute, while at song’s end a video taken that day captures the sound of an unseen audience applauding. With the spell of performance momentarily broken, the guitarist smiles and says two words before dropping to adjust the settings on her effects pedals: “Thank you.”
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That thin man dressed in black, stopped in his tracks on a summer’s day by the sheer force of the sound and presence of the guitarist? There are millions like him now, scattered around the world, all held in thrall by this fascinating creature named Tash Sultana. Nearly three years later, she has become one of the most successful Australian artists of her generation, with the sort of wide appeal rarely seen.
As well as using an array of technology to build songs that sound like much, much more than one person is playing them, Sultana — a self-taught musician born in Melbourne in 1995 — is equipped with the ability to sell tens of thousands of concert tickets in Europe, the US and Britain.
She was the first artist in history to sell out London’s 5000-capacity Brixton Academy three times without a full-length release to her name. Her domestic audience is just as fervent: in her home town, the busker has since graduated from pedestrian malls to the Margaret Court Arena, where in December she set a record for a music concert by selling 7349 tickets.
That song she performed in the Bourke Street Mall, when very few people knew her name? It has since been played more than 46 million times on Spotify, while the six tracks from the Notion EP have racked up more than 121 million plays. When the music video for a new song named Salvation was published on YouTube in June, it attracted more than 700,000 views in a month.
Though she began writing the songs that appear on her debut album, Flow State, about four years ago, Sultana was in no mind to rush to market. “I think the way that everything has happened for me was just the way that it was meant to,” she tells Review. “I didn’t release a lot of music, and all of this has happened — which is kind of strange. It doesn’t usually go that way.”
With plenty of time to consider its shape and sound, then, it’s no surprise that Flow State is just as expertly crafted as everything Sultana has done in public since 2015. Bookended by an introductory track and an outro, and running at just over an hour, the album is structured and paced to mimic her immersive, genre-hopping live performances, which contain elements of rock, pop, reggae, hip-hop, soul and electronica.
Perhaps the most surprising track is Seven, a propulsive instrumental that features prominent violin, cello and flute, all of which Sultana sampled on a synthesiser. When met with a suggestion that it sounds as if it should be heard through a beefy cinema sound system while accompanied by sweeping shots of mountainous landscapes, she replies: “That’s why I wrote the song. I want it to get picked up for a movie score at some point. No one asked for it. I just thought: ‘F..k, this would be sick, so I’ll write a real orchestral piece and hopefully someone puts it in their movie.’ It’s my favourite song on the album.”
Seven offers a fine insight into how her mind works, for Sultana’s dexterity is such that she can dream up sounds and devote herself to capturing them herself, just as imagined, rather than relying on other musicians to help her. Thanks to hard graft and a willingness to learn new things, she is proficient at more than a dozen instruments — a number that is likely to grow in the years ahead.
As an independent act who has built her career from the ground up, Sultana is proud that her debut album will be released on her independent label, Lonely Lands Records, with Sony Music handling distribution. Asked about the benefits of being independent, the artist is typically blunt. “I own all my shit,” she replies. “I have full creative control; no one owns any part of my copyright. I feel like I’m not in debt to anybody. It’s not a bad position to be in.”
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Social media is a key factor in understanding the explosion of global interest that surrounds Sultana’s music. In April 2016, a popular Facebook page named Young Black n Deadly shared her bedroom recording of a song named Jungle, which was among the first sparks that led to the wildfire; it has since been watched more than 15 million times on that platform, and there have been 23 million views on YouTube for another version of the same song.
Something about these videos of an impassioned artist lost in her music struck a chord. While it’s relatively easy to connect the dots backwards and suggest that, given her abundant skill as a composer, Sultana’s success was an inevitability, there are countless talented artists who languish at the fringes of popular culture without ever being acknowledged by large audiences.
From Sultana’s perspective, the past couple of years have been eye-opening and personally challenging, as she has continued to develop as a performer and songwriter while in the public eye.
“I think I’ve just realised that I’ve got a lot to learn, to be honest,” she says. “If you asked me a year and a half ago, I probably would have said something along the lines of, ‘I’ve already got it in the bag, and I don’t need to take advice’ — but that’s just bullshit. I was being uneducated, in that sense, because there’s so much to learn.”
The album title is a term for the cognitive process that occurs when a person is so immersed in an activity that their focus narrows to that one task, to the exclusion of everything else that surrounds them. Perhaps you’ve experienced it while doing something you love, whether that’s playing sport, composing a photograph, painting a portrait or reading a beautifully written story.
Flow State is a particularly apt title for Sultana, as it is exactly what she exemplifies in that Bourke Street Mall video from late 2015. It’s also the space she tends to inhabit when writing and playing music. “If I’m just sitting and jamming, and it’s in the right pocket, that’s where I go,” she says of the term, which she only heard for the first time about a year ago, when visiting her naturopath.
While this state tends to resist being coerced or manufactured by those who seek it, Sultana has gained some insights into laying the groundwork so that it may be reached.
“I try not to be stressed, and I try not to be tired,” she says. “Stress is a big one. If I can’t shut my mind off, I feel like it gets in the way of your general flow; you’re not in synch with yourself when your mind is across 20 things, as opposed to nothing. I used to be able to function on no sleep, and I’d get drunk all the time, do all that shit, but now I don’t. I’m sober, and my body and my mind are really sensitive now.”
She pauses, then adds: “It sounds weak as f..k for someone who’s a musician, but that’s where I’m at.” On the contrary, Review suggests, that’s called being a professional and knowing that thousands of people are depending on your best self to show up each night.
“It’s called being responsible,” she replies. Indeed it is, and that’s a wonderful alternative to the rock-star cliche of being self-obsessed to the point of self-destruction.
“I feel like you’re a bit of an arsehole if you do that, to be honest,” says Sultana. “You can only go so far being like that, before people just can’t be f..ked with you any more. You’d get fired from a normal job if you did that, and you’re not going to have a good relationship with your agents, promoters and management if you’re doing that shit all the time.”
When Review connects with her in the midst of a New Zealand tour in late July, Sultana has recently celebrated her 23rd birthday. Having clocked up about 250 shows in the past 18 months — as well as experiencing drug-induced psychosis as a teenager — she can speak with some authority about the dangers of artistic burnout.
“I don’t go on the road for longer than a month without going home for a month,” she says. “When all this happens to you when you’re really young … I just jumped f..king straight into it, and made one big party of it, then it put me on my arse in the end. I can’t drink, I can’t do drugs; my brain is not built for that shit. So I’ve become sensitive to sleeping when I need to sleep — just having a real nanna life — and then getting on stage. That’s how it is.”
Looking ahead, her schedule is booked through to late next year, with a couple of six-week breaks blocked out on the calendar so she can rest and recharge. Everyone surrounding Sultana is mindful of the need to strike a balance between her public life as a performer and the necessary downtime for self-care.
For an artist who gives so much of herself on stage — just one musician surrounded by her instruments, her mind aflame with possibility — what is most remarkable of all, however, is how fully formed that Bourke Street busker was almost three years ago. All that has changed during that time is the number of people who have stopped to listen, and stayed.
Flow State is due for release on Friday via Lonely Lands Records/Sony.