The profound laughter of Gelli Haha

I stepped into the “Gelliverse” for the first time for her homecoming show in Boise, Idaho for Treefort Music Fest earlier this year. It’s a trippy, soft-play world of bubbles, primary colours, inflatable sea creatures and optical illusions. Backed by a duo of dancers in the impish spirit of Thing 1 and Thing 2, they delight us with tricks like hiding beneath a parachute to create the illusion of Gelli having freakishly long, uncontrollable arms. It’s these simple, carnival theatrics that thrill the inner child; a headfirst fall down the rabbit hole into a freakish, Italo disco wonderland.

You’ll find Gelli Haha’s debut album Switcheroo somewhere “between Studio 54 and Area 51” – but at the beginning, our new favourite party girl was straight-edged. Angel Abaya worked in Idaho for local arts organisations, releasing sweeping folk-rock music under her government name. There is a premonition of Gelli Haha even then, in the squirming synths and proclivity for touches of electronic strangeness. But the curtain fell when she moved to LA in 2021, building her anew after the pandemic razed those old familiarities to the ground.

Meeting Sean Guerin of De Lux, Gelli Haha was born. Together, they plundered toyboxes of vintage synths to create billowing soap bubbles of disco, sleazy, Euro new-wave pop and collages of chaos. “A big thing for me on this record, and why I wanted to make something different, was because I took myself too seriously,” Abaya shares. “And I wanted for people to take me seriously as an artist, but that was no fun. Now, it’s the reverse: people take me seriously even though I’m not taking anything seriously at all. I’m getting what I wanted just when I realised it’s not what I want anymore. It’s not my focus. I don’t care what people think about me, I just want to create an experience that changes people and moves people … I feel very understood and seen with the weirdness of it all.”

From the beginning, Abaya wanted to reconcile her musicianship with her background in dance production: or, create “a multimedia living art project.” Gelli Haha was not a costume or an alter ego, but an extension of herself she intended to embody completely. Red was always a given, the colour of a life force and the passion that created it; she cut her hair into a playful 1920s bob in the style of a Ziegfeld Follies dancer.

“Now it’s full throttle,” she says. “I don’t wear anything else, and if I do, it feels really weird for me. I don’t want it to feel put on; I want Gelli to feel as real as possible because that’s how I designed the show.” For her theatrical references, she describes a dizzying collision between Lady Gaga’s earliest performances (“changing the world one sequin at a time”) and Liza Minelli in Cabaret.

But having this much fun is not as easy as it looks. It takes practice, and a lifetime of unlearning all that has dulled our imagination. “Funny Music” was the first song she wrote with Guerin. It’s barbed with the psychological tension of being a clown: “I’m funnyyyy!” she pleads over soaring synths which ends in a sincerity-bursting bonk. Taking a while to ease in to the irreverence, Guerin told her to sing any words that came to mind. Annoyed by the frivolous suggestion, she quipped what would become the song’s first lyrics: “I don’t write, write the rules / Don’t follow you”.

“I wasn’t quite comfortable with making quote-unquote ‘mistakes’,” she shares. “But then I realised, ‘It’s not that I’m making mistakes, we’re just playing and exploring things’. I did have to cry a bit about it, tears were shed with ‘Funny Music’ because I had to process that I’m not wrong, we’re just figuring it out together.”

On “Spit”, a hypnotic, ever-spinning glitterball, she chants “Surrender”. It became her mantra for the album: a call to arms for her audience and an affirmation for herself. Intuition could take the driver’s seat. “Most of the record, I didn’t premeditate the lyrics. Ideas started to just naturally come to me,” Abaya says. For the ultra-light “Bounce House”, the lyrics were written on the spot, leaning into the whimsy of a children’s birthday party with an adult’s play on words.

“Even if it’s silly, whatever is coming out of me is probably the most honest thing,” she tells me. Abaya and Guerin cooked up the idea for her to write drunk one night (Guerin is sober). Armed with tequila sodas in the studio, the results were not quite as they expected: “I think the idea was to see if I’d get wild, crazy and fun, but really if I’m just drinking by myself – which is not something I do – I just wanted to talk.” The track is a woozy account of a time she peed in a jar at a house party; she holds forth in a rambling, intoxicated drawl (“And… uh, the floor is on the bed… the floor is on the bed, is that what I said?! Hahahaha, oops!”), backed with an ultra-fizzy, strutting beat.

“I love it here, I love coming back,” Abaya says of her Boise homecoming. “It’s cool to see friends who I’ve known for a long time, and they’ve seen this whole progression of how I grew up in the scene here and how things have changed since. It doesn’t feel like home anymore, but there’s a lot of special feelings especially around Treefort.”

The music and culture festival in Boise excavates the city’s subcultures and brings them to light, with a thriving underground scene and the crowd-drawing might of headliners including Geese, CMAT and Magdelena Bay. Its community-first mindset, founded by artists for artists, is exactly the kind of place a phenomenon like Gelli Haha could one day evolve.

Abaya was part of the festival’s press team for five years, as well as a teacher at Boise Rock School which nurtured young, emerging talent in the city. “Boise has shaped me in every way, who I am artist and the experiences that got me here. I grew up here in a really interesting time. Once, it was a place you would grow up in only to leave – and now, I think people stay more often than not because there is culture here and something to be a part of. I felt like I could be a pioneer of something and build things with people that made an impact in arts and culture. That prepared me for being a small fish in a big pond in LA, in a weird way. I got my time to shine in Boise and gain that confidence,” she says. “I swam back. It’s like the salmon that live in the river and go to the ocean and swim back. That’s such an Idaho thing to say! But I’m a salmon who travelled back.”

The Gelliverse is making its way to your city this year, and her trippy voyage continues in the blue skies with new single “Klouds Will Carry Me To Sleep”. The second album is already underway: “There’s fertile grounds, we’ve been tilling the soil. We’re not going into blind this time. We know exactly what we want to do. ‘Klouds’ is the bridge between worlds, and we’re moving into a bigger and better hermit shell. It’s gonna be fun, I can promise that.”