(Images courtesy the karpel group)
Prepare to be flashed back to the ’70s when you watch up-and-coming queer Australian artist Tanzer’s new music video and project “Disco Instamatic.”
As a proud member of the LGBTQ community, Tanzer’s video features a variety of fellow LGBTQ artists who got the chance to be their most authentic selves on screen.
“Disco Instamatic” is an art installation, in collaboration with Sissy Screens, and the music video was released online June 13, in celebration of Pride Month.
Tanzer said her urge to find a life less ordinary is what fueled her passion for creating music.
“I didn’t really have a lot of opportunity or avenue to express myself,” Tanzer says. “I wasn’t encouraged to do performing arts or music or anything like that, and so my earliest memories were putting on shows in the driveway for my toys.”
Despite not having explicit encouragement at a young age, the artist still found ways to find inspiration from her surroundings.
“My mum used to bring home English language magazines from America, like Vanity Fair and stuff, that would have all that beauty in them,” she says. “I was transformed forever and given a slew of new pop culture and music references and dreams with which to fuel my existing dream world.”
Tanzer added that because she was vocally discouraged from pursuing performing arts, it took her a long time to find her voice. She didn’t perform on stage for the first time until she was 21 years old.
“I kind of took to singing in locked cars in the driveway, you know, just trying to find soundproof places where I could explore my instrument without judgment or discouragement,” she says. “But it meant that just internally — psychologically — I wasn’t able to do it in a public setting until a bit later. But from then, I was just addicted.
“Just the rush I got from being on stage — the rush of being heard,” Tanzer continued, “being able to truly be myself for the first time was incomparable.”
Aside from being a musical artist, Tanzer has also designed clothing, collaborating with other designers.
“I feel like I’m a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none,” she says. “I did a collaborative range of T-shirts with a boutique costumier designer in Melbourne called Alice Edgeley. It was a huge success; I was so proud of it.”
To top it off, Tanzer is also a drag king and says she first got into it when she attended a friend’s screening party of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
“My drag queen friends wanted to turn up in drag and they were all boys or nonbinary people who presented as female drag queens and I went, ‘Why don’t I turn up as a boy?’” Tanzer says. “It was shocking to me how natural and easy it was and how little to zero characterization I needed to get in character.”
Tanzer said it felt like she had been rehearsing for that role her whole life.
“Even though now I’m the high-femme diva of dreams, I grew up being an absolute tomboy,” she says. “All I wanted to be was Danny Zuko from ‘Grease’ and Freddie Mercury combined…by the time I put on drag for the first time, I felt like it was very inherent within me how to assume that character.”
After attending the party in drag was a success, Tanzer decided to implement it into her musical performances.
“The first gig I did, I actually changed in-between,” she says. “I did my first number in male drag and then went backstage, washed it all off, put on Tanzer face and then came back out and did a number as a diva.”
Balancing these different aspects of her lifestyle is certainly no easy feat for Tanzer who, at 19, was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, which she says has been an extremely slow, gradual trial and error process.
“I have learned how to schedule and how to allow for things and how to give myself a kind of visual idea of what I have ahead,” Tanzer says. “But honestly, at the same time, I’m always just so brimming with ideas. I want to do everything all the time.”
Tanzer attributes a lot of the music she has made to the inspirations she got from the LGBTQ community. She adds that as she became a more prominent figure in her community, she could feel her music evolve.
“The music that I’ve written was a direct product of the community I represent,” she says.
Tanzer hopes to continue the legacy of what she creates with others.
“I want to keep collaborating,” she says. “I want to keep creating opportunities for all of us to make work together.”
Tanzer’s six-song EP “Disco Automatic” can be streamed online from a variety of platforms and her music video for “Disco Instamatic” can be watched below.
You must be logged in to post a comment.