Grammy nominated composer Cheryl B. Engelhardt and Australian producer-artist GEM have collaborated on an ambient new-age album that takes inspiration from cosmic events such as solar eclipses and super-moons. They discuss working with 3x Grammy winner Producer Lonnie Park, the Dallas String Quartet, pop singer Robin Tucker and GRAMMY-winning vocalist and sound healer Johnaye Kendrick. We sat down and chatted with Cheryl and GEM about the making of their soundscape album According to the Moon.
Cheryl, you’re in New York and GEM, you’re in Sydney, how is the weather and life in general?
Cheryl: We’re both in the middle of storms. I think there’s like lightning and thunder.
GEM: Sydney has a crazy storm today. It’s like cyclone winds outside. So, I apologise for any crazy sounds that we hear.
How did you get first get together and start to collaborate?
GEM: Cheryl and I met through the Recording Academy at an event. I had heard one of Cheryl’s songs, and I absolutely fell in love with it. I thought that her treatment and orchestration of the strings was so divinely feminine, which is not something you can always tell and hear. I was just so excited to collaborate and to meet. We met for a coffee or a tea in New York. It was actually also on a wild stormy day, and it was like flooding, and no one would come out in this weather. But she showed, she arrived right on time. Everything was wild and crazy outside. And yeah, we had a beautiful conversation about New Age and ambient music and then it wasn’t for quite a while after. I’m sort of forgetting the timeline…
Cheryl: You’ve shared that story in a couple interviews already. I can’t remember that coffee date specifically, like, when it was, where it was; what do I remember? I know that there was a meeting, then in February last year, I remember very clearly meeting downtown, it’s the hotel that has the beautiful lobby, that Spanish one. You were like, are you in town for this? Let’s get together. That’s where I feel like the start of this was, at that moment.
So quite recently, really?
Cheryl: Somewhat recently, but it also feels like a long time. You know, some people meet, they bang out an album in a month, and then, boom, it’s something. This feels breathed over for the past year and a half.
Did you physically work together on the album, or did you collaborate remotely?
Cheryl: I don’t think we ever were in the same room, other than when we did a little work with our producer, Lonnie, where we were all piped in together. But it was really across hemispheres, across time zones.
GEM: I remember once that we were both in Europe at the same time in different places in Europe, and then it was Sydney and New York and LA. It really was all over the world, wherever we were. I got a text yesterday from someone who was on an artist retreat in in Norway, and they were listening to “Mountain Meditation”. They said, “GEM, we can feel all of these beautiful elements from the mountains”. That’s because I wrote this and composed this actually on a mountain in Mont Blanc. So, it really is from all over the world, from wherever we were.
A lot of musicians talk about how the environment influences their music, and to me, you’ve taken that to the nth degree. All of these cosmic events have gone into the album – you must be really satisfied with how it turned out.
Cheryl: I personally am very satisfied. But you just said something that’s really dear to me. I have a cute little studio in my house that I love, and I’m always like redecorating, but there is something about being in a very new space and or having something that changes that space up. Like, being in the Alps and saying, “Okay, I’m gonna sit down and work on this piece”. Or when the solar eclipse happened last year, I took my setup, and it was like a two hour period where it didn’t actually go black, but it went this amber orange. It was definitely weird. And so, I wrote the piece that now is on the album called “Eclipse”, during that eclipse, and that really just kind of came through. I’ve been learning about myself, that environment really, is such a huge source of inspiration, and will also kind of dictate what comes out.
I was thinking of the concept of things like eclipses and those moments in time that we have. What do you think resonates in the human spirit and what is it that the universe gives us in those moments?
GEM: Oh, I love that question so much! I think that we’re born of the stars. There’s an internal compass in us that just understands where we’re from and that we’re all very interconnected. I think that these cosmic events are a tie to community and a tie to each other. I think that’s why we all go out and stare at the moon. Everyone’s like, “have you seen the moon”? It’s universal, everyone all over the world is just standing there completely in awe. Cheryl and I are both very moved by cosmic events. I think it’s a beautiful base for an album, and something that we both wanted to really honour and take those times. Cheryl composing “Eclipse” and I did the synth on “Equinox”. I was in LA at the time, but I was homesick and missing my family in Australia and I loved that feeling of in an Equinox, we have equal light and dark. I was looking up; we’re all staring at the same sky. I might be 8000 miles away, but we’re all very interconnected. And I think that’s one of the big themes of the record.
You talk of music as healing and looking at healing energy. I’m a great believe that music can help heal. How do you encourage people to heal themselves through music.
Cheryl: My answer for that is something I started experimenting with a little bit, having people go through a process. They may have been resisting or not even knowing that they needed to go through. Emotion is energy in motion, and if we’re not moving that energy, it gets stuck and it turns into sickness or pain. We lash out at people. It shows itself in other ways, if we’re not being responsible for moving it out.
I got really interested in how can we have someone feel something with the music? Maybe it starts tense or darker, and then the piece of music actually turns lighter, sort of brings the listener by the hand through a process that they needed to go through, that they might not have been able to go through. I experimented with that on my first New Age album, like six, seven years ago. I really liked that, and it seemed to be working. I don’t have any like, science back up or anything yet, but I will one day, I think.
GEM: Saying that, on this record, we did follow a very exact template mapping that is used by Dr Joe Dispenza and for his events. Both Cheryl and I have done a lot of work within frequency and mapping tempos, brain coherence. I love the points that Cheryl just said about that bringing you into the light and taking your hand. I think that’s really beautiful. I think we’ve also done that with the collection of songs, how you work through them. I think that you can embed true intention and emotion. I’m a big believer that when you blend intention and frequency, you can have a very powerful healing effect.
I think that’s certainly evident on one of our tracks, “Crescent Cradle”. It starts with sound balls and is in 432 Hertz, and then it has a really haunting and gorgeous vocal of a gorgeous musician and vocalist, Johnaye. I think that this sound healing for a lot of people. It can be different styles of music. This is just the music that that we love and adore. But I think music is the communicator. You see that in even in elderly people who have completely lost their memory, and they’ll sit down at the piano, and they’ll remember how to play piano, and it really is the bridge, isn’t it? Sound is an incredible healer.
Getting back to the album, you mentioned Lonnie Park before. What was it like working with him? What did he bring to the album that really made sense?
GEM: Cheryl and I are both fairly confident producers, so we really wanted to bring in someone with that wow factor. And I think Lonnie, he did a really good job of sitting back and letting, well, encouraging more than letting, encouraging us to become more of ourselves in the sounds on the record. I think initially it was a lot more ambient. We had a different set of requirements, and Lonnie listened, and he’s like, this sounds like a bit of both of you, but I’m not hearing you as individual artists. I want to listen to it and know that, oh, that’s GEM, or that’s Cheryl, and have those unique parts. And he really bought that out of us. He would send us mixes back, and we’d be like, Oh, really. You can really hear the parts that are Cheryl and really hear the parts that are GEM. I love that. Two people can be very equal and present on a record, and what do those two colours sound like together.
Cheryl: Well, yeah, that that’s the thing for me. It’s funny because I do hear us really distinctly. But I think before we brought Lonnie, and we had done a lot of the record, before we even considered bringing someone else in, (let alone got through all the stuff to actually sign them on), it was also really sort of separate beforehand as well, but in a different way. Not it was kind of like, here’s a colour and here’s a colour, but they weren’t even in the same space. It’s not like they weren’t in the same container. We were doing the same thing, but it was a little more kind of safe, I think, inside of that genre. I like this colour thing, though, like really taking the two colours and making a third one. I felt like Lonnie was like, one plus one equals five.
The sum is greater than the individual parts.
GEM: Exactly! It’s exponentially better because of Lonnie. He did give us permission to explore more of ourselves. He was referring to us as characters, “Here’s the GEM”. Initially I didn’t even have any vocals, and he brought out those distinct characteristics within us as artists, which I think the record really benefits from.
How was it working with the Dallas String Quartet? In my mind, string quartets are naturally healing.
Cheryl: I love them. I’ve worked with them for years, and they are really diverse in terms of what they can play. I mean, they kind of got their start at high-end parties, weddings, you know, A-list celebs playing pop covers in a classical team. We had the same publicist at the time, and they were like, we want to do more than just us. They’re all virtuosic musicians at each of their instruments. I was like, well, I’m doing this New Age album. I love writing for strings. Let me write you in. That started our collaboration. I had a little convincing of GEM to do. I think we can go ambient with this new album, because I can go really cinematic, which was not the point of this album.
GEM: I was like, Oh no, it’s gonna be 7000 notes per “relaxing” show.
Cheryl: I was allowed one key change, and I was like, sold. I can do that. But they were really great. I had them on old songs. This is why I knew that they would be great for this project, because I had them on a piece where they just literally are holding notes and they’re just doing something with a whole note. They’re not just sitting on it. It wasn’t just like, let’s have strings on this. It was like, let’s have Dallas String Quartet on.
You’ve also enlisted singers Robin Tucker and Johnaye Kendrick. How did those collaborations come about?
GEM: I love how Johnaye came to us. Cheryl actually saw something on Instagram, which I love. The algorithm was like; you guys love ambient Healing Music. Here is someone just beautiful. Cheryl saw a reel and sent it to me – what do you think about this? What I thought was, who was this Earth Angel before us? That was absolutely beautiful. She’s renowned in her own right, but that was very magical. And Robin, I’ll let Cheryl talk about Robin, who was mentored by Cheryl.
Cheryl: He started as my intern a million years ago, turned into my sort of like a V/A assistant. While he is building his own career. He’s really young, just out of Berkeley College Music. I love his voice, and he can do anything with it. I hadn’t thought of him until GEM sent me “Equinox”. I think what you had said was, like, “I sang over the whole track – Lonnie Cheryl, take out what you don’t want”.
GEM: I had also done that live on the equinox. I was, like, deep in my feelings. There was a lot of vocalising that I wouldn’t have usually sang if I was planning to, there was a lot of these hooks that were quite emotional. Like, it would scoop down and then go high.
Cheryl: It was really cool vocal stuff. I was like, GEM, can I try something? I have a singer, and he’s done some New Age stuff. He’s finding his own in the sort of LGBTQ+ pop community and is such a such a cool kid. I was like, hey, Robin, we just double this vocal that GEM did, exactly, but an octave lower. He’s like, yeah, sure, no problem.
He’s not really great at telling me no, which I love about him, but also, we’re working on it and then we gave it to Lonnie. And Lonnie was, all right, let me mould this into this piece. There’s a sonic boom at the end that feels like that’s the time of this longest moment. Because the song really was about everyone with the same time, everywhere, it was so perfect to bring in a male vocal and just be super inclusive. The rest of the album is so very female heavy, produced by, composed by, female guests, mastered by, you know, so just it felt like, and then when he sent the vocal back, I’m like, it was flawless.
Are there any plans to tour?
GEM: Yes, Australia currently, we have a few shows booked. We are patiently and lovingly waiting for a visa for my safe return to the US.
Cheryl: We’re doing the real digital push. We’re working with some people too and just really encouraging our fans. We have different fan bases on different platforms, and just really like encouraging them to put it on playlists and to kind of spread it the way one does digitally. Yeah, so I think that that we did the initial push for the first week, and I think that that’s going to be like a longer rollout.
Some select tracks will have ambient mixes with the vocals out and releasing those. There are a lot of playlists that are like, we love this, we just don’t have anything with vocals on it. It’s not just about taking the vocals out; it’s really filling that space and sort of remixing and arranging some of these pieces that I think will find even another home. So, it’s like, we have 80% of this. Why would we not just do it again? So, I think that’s also coming up this year.
GEM: I heard the word remix. I’ve also had a lot of people who run yoga studios and Reiki events, and they’ve given me feedback about the ones that have been put into those playlists, and why. So, I think that because this is for a healing community; having those play, they can listen through without vocals or have things a little softer that don’t have quite as much movement. For those, I think it’s going to be really beneficial. And then you’ve got the album, if people want to listen through, have a glass of wine, have a beautiful cup of tea, or if they actually want to put it in their yoga studio. And as Cheryl said, move through their emotions, through motions, very physical. Work with it. I think it lives in both of those worlds very easily.
Is it the type of thing that you can recreate easily, live?
Cheryl: If you’ve got GEM on your team, you can.
GEM: And Cheryl can show us incredible, beautiful piano and vocals. We’ve got quite an array of pedals and effects and lots of buttons. John, I like pushing lots of buttons.
Cheryl: Just plop me behind a piano and tell me what to play. Honestly, the live show has been part of the vision of this album. Every time we have a conversation, it’s not a coincidence, I mean, I’m in white and GEM is wearing black. Like, every call we have without planning it, we’re in opposite colours. There’s been this sort of opposite hemispheres, opposite signs, the Yin Yang.
So, to be on stage with the tech of the soundscapes and the textures and the ambient stuff. In a perfect world, I’d have an acoustic grand piano, I like the juxtaposition of that just visually too. I think it’s going to just play right into a lot of what this album does. We’ve got “Nightside” and “Dawn Light”. Then we’ve got “Abyss”, which is starting in the light and going into an abyss and coming out of it. And we have “Betwixt”, there’s a lot of that yin and yang. And so, I think the live show, once we get it together, is gonna be just an extension of that, or embodiment of physical embodiment of it.
All images supplied by the artists
