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LONNIE HOLLEY & MOOR MOTHER & IRREVERSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS AT MONA FOMA, 24/2/2024

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  The MONA FOMA summer series of concerts has succumbed to the economic pressures terminating many Australian music festivals. Although Dark Mofo remains to enliven the Tasmanian winter months, it’s lamentable to see the cessation of a program that had the advantage of a balmier season for outdoor performances on the Museum of Old and New Art’s spacious Berriedale lawns. Since its inception in 2009, organiser Brian Ritchie made it his mission to entice Hobart’s residents with an eclectic range of experimental artists such as Philip Glass, David Byrne, Ryoji Ikeda, Julia Holter, Pierre Henry, Tyondai Braxton, Mdou Moctar, John Cale, PJ Harvey, and Antony Pateras, among many others. The inclusion of renowned American free jazz and poetry group Irreversible Entanglements for the second last show is a fitting summation of the institution’s cultural ambition. While this penultimate concert has its languorous moments, the febrile Fire Music energy on display for at least two-thirds of it...
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ENSEMBLE 1 LIVE VIDEO RELEASE

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  Avant rock duo Ensemble 1 from Brighton, UK have just released a new live video from a gig  earlier this year  at London's New Cross Inn. The piece performed is 'Guitar, Bass & Drums I', a reworked version of a track from their debut album.  Joe Potts: Guitar, Laptop Tom Way: Drums  The track is also available in an audio-only version on Bandcamp and can be found here:  https://ensemble1.bandcamp.com/track/guitar-bass-drums-i-live-at-new-cross-inn
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JUNGFRAU - S/T

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  Hannah Louise Grasskamp’s songs are enigmatic Gothic pop confections, blending euphoric impressions of fairy tale magic with undercurrents of intrigue and threat. Fantastic motifs like ice giants and underwater kingdoms are invoked, but unlike most fairy tales, the songs do not present neat resolutions or a coherent moral didactic purpose. They follow a darkwave tradition wherein imagery from childhood fantasy serves to illustrate adult existential concerns – think Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure at their most conflicted and chilling.  Grasskamp’s Brighton-based band Jungfrau has acquired a new focus with its shrinkage from quintet to a trio featuring the vocalist, Matt McCartney on bass, and Timothy Cottrell on synthesizer, and live and programmed drums. Their new self-titled release features five tracks that herald a directional shift. Shades of hypnagogic pop and darkwave’s cross-fertilization with post-metal now overlay and complement the drone-oriented neo-psyc...
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ENSEMBLE 1 - DELAY WORKS

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    Ensemble 1 is an avant rock duo from Brighton, UK, specializing in the exploration of digital delay-based phrasal repetition and heavy, cyclical rhythms. Guitarist Joe Potts and drummer/bassist/composer Tom Way operate on the border line between math rock and prog metal, navigating a Venn zone of intersection teeming with the fractal curlicues of minimalism and durational elements of modern composition. Psychedelic swirls in the mixture tap into a venerable echo guitar heritage, occasionally suggesting an unlikely aesthetic union of Achim Reichel & Machines and Meshuggah. It’s an intoxicating mix that’s hypnotic from beginning to end of the three, lengthy tracks - ranging from nearly 10 minutes to over 23 – that comprise Delay Works , the duo’s latest release on Halfmeltedbrain Records. Opener ‘Distorted Fades’ is an invigorating statement of intent, an avant-metal power drive enriched with the rotational propulsion of 6/8 time. Overlapping layers of extended tec...
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THE BRACKISH - DONOR ZONE

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  Released in September 2023, Donor Zone is the fifth album from Bristolean experimental rock quartet The Brackish. The imaginative flair they demonstrated on their previous 2021 release on Halfmeltedbrain Records, Atlas Day , has transferred successfully back to Stolen Body Records, who released Firm But Fair in 2018. The twin guitar interplay of Neil Smith and Luke Cawthra rests securely as always on the bedrock grooves and transitional dexterity of bassist Jacob Tyghe and drummer Matt Jones. Jazz – the broadest of musical churches – is a crucial ingredient, allowing the cohesion of formal elements in four tracks that successfully combine longform composition and improvisation. The martial manoeuvres of opener ‘Willox for a New Age’, conjure an atmosphere somewhere between John Zorn’s jazz noir concoctions and the polyrhythmic convolutions of Henry Threadgill’s Very Very Circus. An initially merry, if spiky, tone turns increasingly uneasy with each transition. This track se...
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CHRIS ABRAHAMS/OREN AMBARCHI/ROBBIE AVENAIM - PLACELESSNESS

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  This collaboration between Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim brings together three of Australia’s most innovative experimental musicians. Although Ambarchi is now based overseas, the trio's improvisatory practice retains a collective identity. This is an artistic interaction developed through years of friendship and enhanced by each musician’s refinement of his own methodology. The grounding of this practice and the open-endedness of the music generates an intriguing tension, a simultaneous augmentation and contradiction of the title’s semiotic chain of meaning. Placelessness is a term coined by Canadian geographer Edward Relph in the 1970s to describe the erosion of individuality of place under modernity. Capitalist imperatives (commercialisation, mass consumption) and bureaucratic standardisation instil homogeneity in the cultural environment. A companion concept in the field of anthropology, describing a similar form of alienation, is the non-place. Marc Aug é...
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ANOCHT-KLAVIER KRIEGER-STRIBORG AT ALTAR, 1/7/23

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  This concert provides rewarding insights into the fruitful intermingling of genres that occurs on metal’s experimental fringe. Anocht and Klavier Krieger, two artists from Melbourne, join Tasmanian underground legend Striborg for a series of solo performances where the theatrics and bleak themes of black metal meet dark ambient textures and mutant synth pop. Anocht initiates proceedings with strategies inherited from Blue Sabbath Black Cheer’s noise metal scene, layering ear-splitting shards of feedback guitar over a low ominous pulse. His 30-minute set is a feverish trail of amorphous themes that shares atmospherics with the dank, tomb-scented exhalations of Gnaw Their Tongues and Abruptum. Tortured vocalising over synth tritones and chitinous squeaks gives way to an even more dour sequence of delay accumulated guitar riffs collapsing into a swirling fog of distorted moans. Klavier Krieger’s set begins with isolated, echo-drenched beats, opening space that will be graduall...
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