Lady Lash

Transcendence, truth and sonic landscapes. Journalist Rhianna Patrick takes us inside spiritual misfit Lady Lash’s musical rebirth.

Lady Lash is part of a generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists who are taking musical fusion to new levels and bending genres while finding their true selves in what they create.

For decades, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists have been blazing their own paths through the contemporary Australian music scene. Often through necessity. They continue to break down doors for the next generation all the while bringing something new to the scene and doing it in their own way.

From Yothu Yindi’s debut album Homeland Movement, which drew on a Yolgnu song series – something which had never been done on a rock album in Australia – to MC Heffa rapping in Luritja in the 1990s and gaining national airplay with his song ‘Warumpi’. Fast forward to 2022 and the current rise of Indigenous electronic artists and DJs sees Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders continuing to push music boundaries in this country.

Lady Lash is one of those adding to this new sonic history, and if her latest musical offering is anything to go by, it’s another departure from the hip hop persona she’s become known for.

Under her stage name Lady Lash, Crystal Clyne Mastosavvas has been able to bring both her Kokatha and Greek identities to whatever she creates. The eldest of six children, Crystal grew up in Ceduna on the West Coast of South Australia where she spent her childhood learning to sing and rap by listening to her mum’s cassettes and from whatever she heard on the radio.

While still a teenager, she was invited by her Uncle Bunna Lawrie to perform backing vocals for his band, Coloured Stone. This led to her going on tour with the band and featuring on their 1998 album, Rhythm of Nature. It was this experience as a 16-year-old which gave her a glimpse into the possibility of a career in the music industry.

It’s been more than a decade since Lady Lash burst onto the scene with her own brand of hip hop; a fusion of jazz and soul which showed off her vocal ability on her 2010 EP, Pearl.

While it cemented her as a hip hop artist in a male dominated genre, Lady Lash’s music has never stayed just in hip hop and has morphed to express the other musical genres and styles which inhabit her.

There’s no greater example of this than 2013’s The Fisherman’s Daughter which paid homage to the fishermen roots of her Greek grandfather and father. This was the first evolution of Lady Lash into her alter ego Crystal Mercy with an album which put her love of jazz, soul and funk firmly front and centre.

It’s this versatility as an artist that places Lady Lash in a precarious position; not knowing how to describe her as an artist in the mainstream music industry or being able to fit into marketable neat boxes. These are things that Lady Lash has never been too phased by.

“…It was like, there's more of me that I need to express. So, jumping into Crystal Mercy was a big, massive step because it was sitting with myself more and understanding who I am and what I want to do, but I knew there were different transitions in my journey. I'm a very intuitive reader and a spiritual reader and I understand that there's more of my calling through music. I was like, I don't want to do hip hop, but I want to do soul and jazz and then I do want to do hip hop, it was very much… where I wanted to sit… and I was like, you know what, f*ck it. I'm just gonna do everything and I don't care what people say. So yeah, it was almost like a competition to myself, but also proving people wrong, that I'm able to do this.” – Lady Lash

This lack of care about what the mainstream music industry thought of her genre bending music fusion meant Lady Lash could continue to create from deep within and affirm that her ‘calling through the music’ brings her into existence.

During the late 2010s, Lady Lash started to move in yet another direction, one which was related to her hip hop foundations but that pushed her to experiment with sound and how she could further manipulate it.

Mother Moon (2018), Cats Eyes & Sirens Mouths EP (2018) and Yadu (2019) signalled the next metamorphosis of Lady Lash which set her on a path of rebirth, renewal and the conception of her latest album, Spiritual Misfit.

“…This new music calls me… It was time, opening up, going back home as self-reflection, self-identity, understanding who I am, the purpose of who I am, why I'm making music, why I am the way I am… That was a massive spiritual journey for me and felt like I was ripped from my core, ripped into the sky filled with stars and then deep into the ocean, you know?... I have dark and light every single day. I feel like I'm dying and then rebirthing myself, you know, it's constant.” – Lady Lash

Spiritual Misfit is unlike any other album from an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander artist and could be considered a concept album in the story it tells. An album crafted during the end of her marriage, going back home to country to film her documentary and multiple Covid lockdowns.

From its opening track ‘Black Woman in the Flames’, the album puts you on notice that this is not an album to be played out of order and by its very nature, commands you to listen to it in full first. From the gut-wrenching cry in ‘Love My Darkness’ to the instrumental soundscape of ‘Nocturnal Lover’ and its closing track ‘N.Y.X Poetry’, you could be mistaken for thinking this album takes longer than the just under 35 minutes it does to listen to it all. It’s as though these songs have come down from space to create this out of body experience, only they haven’t, and it’s probably telling that it feels that way despite being connected and rooted to the oldest continuous living culture on this planet.

Spiritual Misfit is an album which definitely sits outside of any genre classification (although it has been called witch house – an occult themed electronic microgenre), yet despite being undefined, it calls to you on another frequency. Lady Lash attributes these frequencies to her spirituality but also to the feminine energy infused in this record. Its inclusion was Lady Lash’s acceptance of her womanhood after working in masculine music spaces like hip hop.

Spiritual Misfit was written and recorded over a two-month period, but the experience had a strange effect on Lady Lash with a need to feel the music, to feel the weight of her instruments and to be physically present and aware of the music-making process.

Lady Lash believes that this body of music has helped the evolution of her spiritual self, opened her up to wisdom, made her more confident in her womanhood and that becoming a grandmother has moved her into a ‘crone’.

If this is the work of a crone, then it can only lead to more innovation in the contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music space, adding to the ever-evolving Indigenous music canon.

This article was created as part of ‘The Record: Australian Music On Wikipedia' project which aims to increase the discoverability of Australian artists online funded by Australia Council for the Arts in partnership with Wikimedia Australia, Australian Music Vault, APRA AMCOS, Australian Music Centre, and Country Music Association of Australia.

Find out more about the project →

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rhianna Patrick is a Torres Strait Islander media professional with family connections to the Zagareb (Mer) and Wagadagem (Mabuyag) clans of Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait). Rhianna spent nearly two decades at the ABC working across news and television documentaries and presenting national radio programs before joining IndigenousX as its Head of Audio and Podcasts in 2020. She now works as a freelance journalist and content creator.