Elizabeth Sanctuary Welding School for Girls is the project of Pōneke (Wellington), New Zealand based artist Fi, who has been making music under the name since 2023. Blending surreal soundscapes of roaming delicacy and slashed by the edges of brutalist noise, Elizabeth has since bleed out from the digital world into this physical one as Fi found the conflicting sounds a motivating comfort in her own spaces. Now, Elizabeth is set to release her next album titled Pike on September 20th. A few days ago, Fi released “Avoidant 7th” the latest test run from the album and the second single following “Pike” (the song).

Upon searing feedback that leaves its mark, “Avoidant 7th” explodes into a hidden pop gem. With pitched vocals, crumbling instrumentation and several lacerations of melodic savviness, this song feels to live such a full life in such a short amount of time. But as we inch closer to the release of Pike, each song piecing together this larger image that Fi has created so genuinely, Elizabeth starts to become its own entity entirely. Elizabeth builds a space where the creepy crawlies that live around us are met with the sincerity of their motives, whose spaces are meant to be shared with all of their natural dispositions and beauty despite the manufactured fears that have brought us to this point. Through the churning gears and wires misfiring, through the grim, grit and glitch, these spaces that Fi creates aren’t a plea to understand this world, but rather an invitation to enter and to live and to prosper in it as we were always meant to.

We recently got to ask Fi a few questions about the project, where she found Elizabeth’s sound, connection to body horror and noise, as well as who the girl is that’s inside the computer.

On your previous album Plastic Double, you spent an extended amount of time working on it, but only allowed yourself little time to work on each song. What did you take away from that process and did you carry that practice through as you began to work on Pike? 

I’ve been working on the album Pike since before Elizabeth had her name. I had a plan and a story and lyrics for most of an album since like mid 2023 and made like 80% of it across the first half of last year before completely stalling out and never finishing the last 20%. Plastic Double was purely procrastination. I think I sold myself the lie that if I made an EP really fast I’d be teaching myself how to just finish and release things, but in reality I think I was just making some quick pop music so I didn’t have to deal with any of the album songs that had actual emotional weight to them. I am actually slowly getting back to finishing and releasing things but I think that’s less me learning my lesson and more the people I love giving me consistent gentle reminders that the thing I’ve been spending so long making is actually worth love and attention and letting go of.

I guess this is a good time to ask you about the project name. It’s really unique and really sticks to ya when you first read it. What’s the story behind it?

I was trying to come up with a name for a noise band that I was theoretically in with a couple friends ( we practiced like twice and then stopped existing ) and one of them suggested naming the band after the name on the most neglected grave in a graveyard. I thought it was funny and went to look but every broken or neglected grave I found just belonged to a woman named Elizabeth. There were like five or six of them. I was kind of hoping for something prettier but that just made me feel like I was just another person neglecting the Elizabeths. On the walk back from the graveyard there was a sign for a wildlife sanctuary and I thought the two sounded good together. I don’t know where the welding school bit is from. I found it written in an old notebook of mine I think. 

What sort of sonic avenues did you find yourself exploring on Pike (the album)? Was there anything new that you were trying out?

Kind of everything music wise. I’d never really properly used any music software or produced anything before Elizabeth so Reduction the first single I made for her has been my blueprint for everything else I’ve made. Elizabeth has become like a set of rules that I don’t apply to any other projects. Primarily maximalism. 90+ layers in the DAW. At least. It’s actually become a problem, working on any of the Pike songs requires a six minute buffer while the file loads and I have to process my vocals in a separate project or else my computer crashes. When I tried to export my first single to release it the program crashed five times before I finally got it. I’m always using a lot of bit crushers and pitching everything an octave up, I think I’ve become really attached to everything sounding very bright and borderline ear fatigue-y. It’s really exciting when you find a new way to make a guitar sound like it’s been made with a synthesizer. Plus, lots of processing vocals to glitch and crunch and cut out, partially for the ‘Elizabeth is the girl in the computer’ lore reason, but also because I am super lazy when it comes to rerecording vocals. I’ve been especially into programmed drums too. I get super obsessed with altering each drum hit slightly to try to make it sound as human as possible. Although a lot of it is modelled after real drummers I’m friends with, most of the drum lines on Pike were written by Macks (our old live drummer) and the drums on Kathleen’s Theme are a shameless ripoff of the drummer of Silicon Tongue, who is incredible and chaotic and very hard to imitate with a computer.

Elizabeth feels like a physical being in your world, referring to the project as her, almost like a good friend you’ve known for awhile. What sort of presence does she have in your life and what is your relationship to her?

I guess she is. I have a lot of love for musical projects where there is a bit more of a character side to them, Yeule is a pretty big one, also albums like Wallsocket and Preachers Daughter. When I was making most of the first songs I was being super introverted and a bit depressed and I was trying to get really weird with it to cope with it. Very ‘I will have no eyebrows and I want nobody to talk to me’ sort of thing. I got really attached to the idea of ARGs and making something like that for the music I was making, but also just found it quite funny and a weirdly good coping mechanism to pretend that all of the ARG Elizabeth is a digital dead girl stuff is 100% real actually. I’m not in that same space anymore but you can’t really detach yourself from something you’ve built up in your head like that so she’s Elizabeth and we’re on a first name basis.

What kinds of feelings or stories do you like to tell through your soundscapes? What sort of processing do you feel when building on the sounds you make? 

I’ve been jokingly using the tagline ‘noise pop for dykes’ for a while and I find it a little embarrassing to admit how true Elizabeth being exclusively lesbian music actually is.

I’ve always used music as processing and I feel like queer relationships often feel hyper specific and like they’re factoring in so many more complex factors than a typical cishet dynamic, so there’s so much more you can process! It’s always something I cling to in other people’s music, when I hear something I feel like I can actually align myself with. A lot of the lyrics of Plastic Double were inspired by a terrible hookup I had where the person I’d slept with started insisting that I should save up for surgery. Things that are slightly off putting or hyper specific always get me excited. I love niche feelings. In terms of sounds, I have a friend that says body horror is inherently queer, and I always felt like the same applies directly to the sheer number of queer people in noisy and subversive music genres. I think there’s a specific and powerful emotion that really layered music elicits in me. The tension that something that’s really sparkly pretty and the ugliest sound you’ve ever heard have when they’re in contrast with each other has always felt huge.

Tell me about sourcelister.neocities.org/. What are you archiving on this website? Do you try to make a habit out of archiving? 

Sourcelister is an archive of Pike (the girl, not the album)’s posts, in relation to the recent singles. From what I can tell she’s having an awful night so far. I personally love archiving, blogging and making very messy HTML. One day soon I will launch my secret website where I am slowly archiving every item that I own.

You can listen to all of Elizabeth Sanctuary Welding School for Girls on her site as well as other places you find your music. Pike is set to be released September 20th.

Written by Shea Roney | Photos Courtesy of Elizabeth Sanctuary Welding School for Girls