Having collaborated with various musicians – the most oft-cited being fellow Melburnian Tarquin Manek – a cassette of noise folk by her group F INGERS eventually made its way to Kiran Sande at UK label Blackest Ever Black. Today, it’s safe to call dal Forno one of the label’s flagship artists.

I say ‘flagship’, but dal Forno seems more content with squirreling herself away. “I’m not the person who’s talking the loudest, or the one with the most to say,” she says, wholly unsurprisingly. The title of her 2016 debut, ‘You Know What it’s Like’, proved to be antithetical to its hazy content – a record of more questions than answers, made more puzzling by its air of manacled necessity. Through the mist of tape noise, cobbled drum machines and screeching flutes come to life, while the varying sounds of pouring water – rain, from a jug into a tall glass – ease in and out of earshot, as dal Forno’s obscured vocal calls out from an abyss. Her message? It seems like we don’t know the half of it.

Latest EP ‘The Garden’ sees dal Forno lifting the veil – if only about an inch. Where the vocals of ‘You Know What It’s Like’ seem to have come from underneath a body of water, those of the ‘The Garden’ appear to have at least come from the other side of a fog-soaked valley. In other words, it’s just slightly… louder. “I had a sound card this time,” she says, “which can add higher fidelity.” But the EP is perhaps also the site of resurgent confidence: “it’s entirely self-produced, whereas my album had a co-producer. I probably spent as much time working on the EP – I was doing it all myself and I had a lot to learn.”

Luckily, the songs were already there – but not without the hard graft. “I find that making a song a day generally works,” she says. “It’s hard because you spend the whole day being like ‘this is shit – what am I doing? I suck.’ Sometimes you get to the end of the day and think that was a complete mess, but other times things come together.” She pauses, as if ready to drop a bombshell. “I feel like the difficulty and the insecurity is just part of the process.”

Much of her new EP was born out of need – built from material intended to meet the demands of an ever-lengthening live show. It’s odd to think of music so steeped in mood – worn, fatigued – as being able to fly in a live environment at all. “It can be [difficult],” she says. “I feel like I still play shows where I think ‘fuck that was shit’, but now I play shows I’m really happy with as well.”

I ask if there are any plans to branch out further with a full band?

“Maybe we’ll get more musicians, to try and make it… even more live. I’m not really at a level yet where I can think about doing that though.”

The bold title track of ‘The Garden’ finds dal Forno pushing her minimal craft to its limits. Containing elements lifted from the track of the same name by German industrial pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten (“I can’t say it either,” she laughs), a shoestring synthesizer wilts underneath an austerely functional bass part, as the audible clacking of the strings keeps time. “Initially, I didn’t plan it as a reinterpretation,” she admits. “I was just going to steal this idea of being in the garden and nobody would be any the wiser. If I’m being honest, every track that I’ve written has started with some sort of borrowing from other artists’ ideas. It’s probably a common thing… maybe.” Certainly there wouldn’t be a Pavement without The Fall, but it’s oddly pertinent to think of no Carla dal Forno without Blixa Bargeld and his band. With both acts, sibilant, lo-fi recording devices are as much an instrument as a bass guitar, and a full percussion set can consist of ghostly drum machines and indistinct household objects (invariably struck by other indistinct household objects).

But it’s clear that dal Forno and Bargeld come from different viewpoints lyrically. You won’t find Bargeld in the garden when it’s raining, but there you’ll find dal Forno – “day and night, I’m always outside / I’ll stay out here, through rain or shine.” She tentatively speculates this contrast: “maybe I wrote lyrics that would be a metaphor for some other personal experience of being in the world. I talk about the threat of being outside at night – the creepiness.” A phrase in the EP’s press release, which at first I dismissed, suddenly chimes at the back of my mind: “an acutely female perspective is brought to bear” in dal Forno’s version of the song.