- Genre: 'Indie'
- Release Date: '30th January 2026'
Our Rating:
There are creative groups of all sorts now – mostly online, and mostly in literary circles, where there’s a prompt and the members’ ‘homework’ is to write a poem or otherwise create a piece in response to it. Australian songwriter and choral director/arranger Gitika Partington has been participating in one such group, the iheartsongwritingclub community for the last five years, penning and recording a song a week. And now, she’s decided to put those songs out into the world, under the ‘Twelvefold’ heading. Only, this is a baker’s dozen of thirteen – yes, thirteen – albums released simultaneously.
As we learn, ‘The first twelve albums form a chronological musical record of time passing with a thirteenth album of songs that nearly got away- a body of work intended for wandering, reflection, and long-form listening rather than singles, algorithms, or drip-fed promotion. Lots of the songs are messages to Gitika from Gitika – stories and comments on the day she wrote them. Lots are about returning home, uncomfortable moments, little blasts of therapy, quirky moments. Pleasing no-one but herself.’
As an artist, in whatever medium, pleasing oneself has to be the primary objective. If the aim is fame and fortune, you’re in the wrong business and should be looking at entertainment instead.
With some 120 songs, this is a massive body of work, even by retrospective box set standards – although in context, it seems that this is more about documenting the process and its results, rather than releasing it with the expectation that anyone will listen to it in its entirety. Dipping in and out, it’s clear that these are songs composed and constructed using whatever came to hand: the first album in particular, has the improvisational experimentalism that many of us embraced during lockdown: the percussion for ‘Cooking a Storm’, the first song on the first album, is the sound of rattling cutlery and kitchenalia which, along with synth piano, provides a sparse backdrop to a song contemplating her late mother. Within the personal lies the universal, and some of the songs – subjectively – achieve this.
Stylistically, Partington dabbles with this, that, the other, and whatever else takes her fancy, from lo-fi bedroom pop to shuffling salsa, and while the bulk of it’s electronic-led, there’s some more acoustic-based folky stuff along the way, and swerves into world music.
Touching on serious subjects, her approach to lyrics tends to be light, erring toward the comedic and the flippant, and there are some nice tunes to be found here. With prompt-based projects and copious creative outpourings in general, the quality is usually pretty variable. While it’s by no means the case that every cut’s a classic here (and yes, I did skip a few…), the standard is pretty consistent. And over the course of five year s enforced creative work, that’s good going.
