Cover Image: Ian Lilburne & Emily Gelineau. Image by Alan Holbrook.

Ian Lilburne’s new album Left Hand of Darknes looks outward to space and time while keeping its ear trained on the intimate oddities of human life. Its 13 songs, threaded with instrumentals, began during the suspended days of COVID and gradually became a song-cycle: reflective, sly and difficult to pin to a single genre.

The Perth songwriter, singer and guitarist will launch the album at The Ellington Jazz Club with violinist Emily Gelineau, soprano Sam Ray and bassist Lucy Browning. The combination promises music that moves between folk, jazz and classical textures, sharpened by Lilburne’s wry humour and his fascination with language.

Lilburne has played acoustic guitar and composed for more than 50 years, building a catalogue of about 120 songs and instrumentals and releasing four albums with producers Pete Grandison and Lee Buddle. Yet music is only one strand of his creative life. He was founding director of Perth’s Artrage Festival, a precursor to Fringe World, and later artistic director and producer of UWA’s centenary celebration LUMINOUSnight. Since returning to music after retiring from the events world, he has also become a regular contributor to Perth arts publications, including X-Press and Seesaw.

Poetry and songwriting have always worked in tandem for Lilburne. A featured poet at Perth Poetry Club, he cites prose fiction, modernist wordplay and spy stories alongside popular music as sources for his lyrics. Leonard Cohen remains the decisive influence. Hearing “Laughing Lenny” as a teenager, he says, was like a bomb going off – one that has continued to reverberate through his imagination.

That literary sensibility has attracted favourable comparisons. PerthNow described Lilburne’s lyrics as “evocative and relatable, sometimes heartbreaking or darkly witty”, while Sputnikmusic heard echoes of Michael Stipe and Tim Freedman in his warm baritone and “sharp, heartfelt and poetic” writing.

Left Hand of Darkness found its defining sound when Lilburne began working with Gelineau. He first encountered her playing through her Brazilian-jazz work and a Leonard Cohen tribute, then discovered a musician instinctively attuned to his material. Her textured, melodic lines sit lightly against his intricate guitar picking, opening space around the lyrics rather than crowding them. On the recording, Lilburne also plays bass; Gelineau adds backing vocals as well as her signature violin.

Gelineau brings formidable range to the collaboration. An award-winning violinist, pianist, vocalist, composer and arranger, she studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston and has worked across jazz, country, pop, rock and world music. She played violin on the 8-Bit Big Band’s Grammy-winning 2022 arrangement of “Meta Knight’s Revenge”, and her own show Tea for Two – A Tribute to Stéphane Grappelli won the Music & Musicals award at Fringe World 2024. X-Press Magazine has called her “something of a musical prodigy”, while another review praised the joy and fun she brings to the stage.

The launch ensemble expands the album’s intimate palette. Sam Ray, Lilburne’s long-term singing partner, has a repertoire spanning opera, jazz, soul, folk and contemporary song. Her career has taken her from studies at WAAPA and the Sydney Conservatorium to performances with SA Opera, WA Opera and the psychedelic world-fusion band Orchid Star at festivals including Glastonbury. Producer Carmelo Musca describes her voice as “ethereal and truly powerful”.

On bass is Lucy Browning, a versatile electric and upright player whose work crosses jazz, folk, pop, rock and musical theatre. A familiar presence at The Ellington, Perth International Jazz Festival, WAMFest, Fringe World and Nannup Music Festival, Browning has also recorded with artists including Cecilia, Veruca Moon, Ruby Pettit and Crystal Adele. Her instinct as a supporting musician – helping other artists realise their musical vision – makes her a natural fit for Lilburne’s carefully balanced arrangements.

For Lilburne, the album’s long gestation is part of its character. The songs began taking shape in 2020, but he says the project only came into focus after meeting Gelineau. Their collaboration gives the music a poised, spacious quality: sophisticated without stiffness, thoughtful without losing its sense of play.

The title may suggest Ursula K. Le Guin’s landmark science-fiction novel, but the album’s concerns are less about literal storytelling than perspective. Space and time become ways of looking sideways at the human conundrum – at isolation, connection and the strange elasticity of experience. The interwoven instrumentals help turn the collection into something closer to a continuous journey than a conventional run of songs.

That approach also reflects the two halves of Lilburne’s working life. His years in festivals and large-scale arts events honed an organiser’s sense of shape and pacing; his return to songwriting has allowed him to bring that structural awareness back to smaller, more personal forms. The result is music attentive to sequence, contrast and the cumulative effect of a set.

At The Ellington, those qualities will be tested in the immediacy of live performance. Gelineau’s violin can move from filigree to rhythmic bite; Ray’s soprano adds colour and dramatic reach; Browning gives the songs a supple foundation. At the centre sits Lilburne’s baritone, guitar and lyrical curiosity, inviting the audience into a world where melancholy, absurdity and wonder share the same orbit.

Expect an evening that is part folk, part jazz and part classical, with a dash of wry humour – and a record that turns the dislocation of recent history into an opportunity to listen differently.

The Left Hand of Darkness album launch with Ian Lilburne, Emily Gelineau, Sam Ray and Lucy Browning is on Monday 26 October 2026; doors 6pm, show 7pm. The Ellington Jazz Club, 193 Beaufort Street, Perth. Tickets $24–$29. See www.ellingtonjazz.com.au