An active member of more bands and arts collectives than you could count on two hands, singer and performer Marcus Whale is running a packed schedule across 2025.
Beyond his upcoming appearance at Melbourne’s live music and performing arts festival RISING where he’s expanding his 2024 album Ecstasy into a full-force series of club nights at iconic venue The Substation, he is hard at work on his follow-up album, tentatively called Underworld.
Throw in a show in Adelaide this July with Melbourne-born performance artist Andrea Illes and a new album with his housemate Gus McGrath’s musical project California Girls, and there’s surely no shortage of plates that Marcus has kept spinning.
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The Sydney-born performer takes a huge array of inspiration for each of his musical and artistic projects, ranging from 1983 vampire classic The Hunger for his 2021 album of the same name to Greek philosophical ruminations on the boundary between the body and the soul for his most recent album Ecstasy.
“It’s the first time I’ve been able to realise a large-scale vision for what the music could become as a performance,” he says of the album’s evolution from strictly audio to multi-sensory performance art.
“I’ve been able to create – I think in the theatre context – to be able to put in a really specific lighting rig, a specific kind of set, and be able to really engineer the audience experience of the music and the performance.”
Given the more contained scope of Marcus’s past shows, his desire has always been to entertain a grander, more operatic scale. The mission statement of Ecstasy’s live performance certainly aims for such heights, with costuming and other thematic visual elements drawing inspiration from Saint Teresa of Avila, as well as many other mystical influences.
The guiding principle within Ecstasy is that of achieving a sense of ekstasis, that of being ‘outside oneself’. “It felt really special to create something that had more of a…” he pauses for a moment and reconsiders. “It’s like going from the church to the cathedral,” he says of the album’s creative growth from the recording studio to the dance studio.
The album’s reception across the past year has been highly positive, placing Marcus in good spirits for the live expansion of the work at RISING.
“It was the first time I put out an album of mine, myself,” he reflects of the last 12 months, “in a way that felt satisfying. I’ve had labels put out my stuff in the past – and I’ve put stuff out myself, not very well – and this time it felt like it connected to people that… really got it.”
Discussing his work like this, amid the present peak of his craft that he seems to have achieved with Ecstasy, there is a notable inflection of pride within his voice.
The work itself is a culmination of his own inspirations, specifically identifying the release as “a really Sydney album,” so for this localised artistic influence to have travelled as widely and successfully as it has marks a significant accomplishment for the mould-breaking artist.
“I think, often releasing music can be really difficult – and a bit of a mindfuck. You’re putting yourself out there and saying, like, ‘Validate me! Love me, be interested in me!’. I think, in the past, when there was a wider audience engaged in new and contemporary music, that felt like there was more expectation placed on it. It felt like releasing music was often a disappointment.”
The contrast today, in the wake of Ecstasy’s broad scope of influence among his established audience and an emerging listener base, Marcus is relieved that his music is now generating more personal responses.
It has been nothing but a wholly lovely experience, he tells me, and a reinforcement that his unwavering artistic vision can live and thrive beyond the specific arenas in which it was created and recorded.
“The album has come from a place of very pure self-expression, in a way that isn’t always that easy to do… As a result, I feel really happy with it – and also ready to move on. I’ve got some new stuff on the way!”
Marcus Whale will be performing at RISING from 11-13 June 2025. Buy your tickets here.
