Dr Thembi Soddell is an award-winning sound artist, composer and practice-based researcher whose key interest lies in the unsettling nature of abstract, acousmatic sound and its potential for generating new understandings of madness and trauma. Using large PAs or structural multispeaker installations, they offer audiences intense encounters with the psychological impact of sound and darkness.

Their last album, Love Songs (ROOM40, 2018), was praised for its ‘innovative approach to form’ (Fluid Radio) and ‘fearless conceptual framework’ (Self-Titled Magazine), its launch winning the 2019 Green Room Award for Contemporary Sound Performance. Its companion installation, Held Down, Expanding (2018), premiered at MONA-FOMA, becoming a finalist in the 2019 APRA-AMCOS Art Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Music.

In 2019 they completed a practice-based PhD, A Dense Mass of Indecipherable Fear: The Experiential (Non)Narration of Trauma and Madness through Acousmatic Sound (RMIT University). This led to two major commissions for The Big Anxiety Festival 2022: UnKnowing Madness, a composition developed through workshops designed for people complex trauma, run by Soddell alongside Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Dr Vanessa Godden and Mehak Sheikh; and Who Is Doing What to Whom? (Object Impermanence) a multispeaker installation exploring the experiential impact of emotional abuse.

Soddell is of Polish and Anglo-Celtic descent, born and living on Djaara Country in regional Victoria. Their work has been presented in galleries including Museo Reina Sofia (2020), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2016), Institute of Modern Art (2016), Wellington City Gallery (2013) and SFMOMA (2002), among others. They have performed extensively across Australia, Aotearoa and Europe, guest-curated for the National Gallery of Victoria (2013), mentored through SIGNAL (2019, 2020, 2022), undertaken a Regional Arts Victoria Fellowship (2020), had research published in Organised Sound (2020) and Disclaimer (2021), and a chapter in the book The Big Anxiety: Taking Care of Mental Health in Times of Crisis (2022). The affective impact of their work is discussed by Dr Cat Hope in the book The Body in Sound, Music and Performance: Studies in Audio and Sonic Arts (2022).