NEW WEIRD AUSTRALIA – SOLITARY WAVE (OUT) & (IN)
"We are concerned with what might be called a
'sense': an organ that perceives, a direction that may be conceived, and a
directly lived movement progressing towards the horizon." Henri Lefebvre, The Production
of Space, 423.
Solitary Wave (Out) and (In) is the first new release of music from Scott Buchanan’s New Weird Australia imprint after a five-year hiatus. The 26-track, two-volume compilation marks the rejuvenation of an annual survey of music from around the continent. It's an eclectic mix of experimental artists drawing on outside influences to smelt an authentic voice in defiance of a cancelled future. Earlier NWA releases like Vox, Western Schism and Rural, Regional and Remote are more comprehensive representations of spatial inquiry. Inquisitive listeners can draw their own conclusions by sampling the label's entire discography via the Bandcamp link below.
“Created in isolation" according to the liner notes, but does the home allow true isolation in an interconnected world characterized by a simultaneity of loneliness? French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre argued in The Production of Space, a semiotic treatise on urban planning published in the pre-internet 1970s, that the abstract space of capitalism depends on consensus for exchange blended with the hint of violence. Nowadays our daily news feeds allow us access to the exponential weaponization of everything in a temporal virulent swirl that his student, Jean Baudrillard, would obsessively describe as an orbital spiral of signs. So it goes in the age of acceleration.
Although it deals only tangentially with art forms like music, the very title/theme of Lefebvre’s book evokes the foundation of music production as an arrangement of sonic spaces: the deployment of reverb to conjure an artificial 'room', stereo panning to suggest movement within space. A matrix of orientations – left, right, louder, softer – meant to warn of danger; psychogeography designed to accommodate neural pathways formed on ancestral prairies. Each track on (Out) and (In)
could be the representation of a psychoacoustic room, patched into a network of
inter-subjective entities where only sonic impressions of space are available. A space much like the head it’s being listened to in. The pandemic cryogenically suspends social space, to extrapolate on
recent musings by journalist George Megalogenis in The Monthly, while
the economic cycle is accelerated, warping time in the process. The last track
by Jessica At Birth on the Solitary Wave (Out) volume features a female
vocalist sounding not dissimilar to Lamb’s Lou Rhodes in Billie Holliday-mode
sing the line “I’ve been locked inside my studio for nearly almost two weeks.”
Only two weeks? Does it only seem like two weeks for her? For us?
It's open to listener interpretation whether the eclecticism of these NWA compilations represent the emergence of specific musical psychogeography through a sublimated aesthetic triangulation of US, UK and European influences, but the blend is often intriguing. There are occasional slippages into a transoceanic anxiety of influence or internalized cultural cringe evinced in pedestrian formalism. The singer of Personal Touch on ‘Incapable’ (Out) tries to evoke the Sisters of Mercy/Interpol school of lead coldwave, but comes across more like the parody of glacial indifference in Peter Cook’s Drimble Wedge creation from Bedazzled.
Lefebvre’s conception of liminal
time was that it’s a temporality in which “history is experienced as nostalgia, and
nature as regret.” There are various incarnations of instrumental electronica and folktronic avant-pop on (In)
and (Out), some positioned interstitially between vaporwave and
hauntology, those millennial expressions of barbed reminiscence. Yunzero’s
‘Hum’ and the dream-paced darkwave of Brainbeau’s ‘The Illumination of Eminonu’
in particular suggest the rural eeriness of Advisory Circle circa As The
Crow Flies. Drum kit and electronics duo Pattern Recognition Machines, on
the other hand, come across as a freeform Silver Apples, and have a parallel in
Canberra duo Spartak. The latter's 2011 NWA New Editions release Nippon reminds us that Miles Davis’
longer 70s tracks are sonic environments to dwell in, not just music to listen to: Teo
Macero's dub atomisation of Jack De Johnette’s drums on ‘Go Ahead John’ propelling
a river cruise through Fourth World jungles.
Spatial violence has riddled the Australian landscape ever since an absolute space described by song lines was reinscribed and partitioned in the representational space of property. This lost spatiality manifests itself in the influence of the cosmic sensibilities of German avant-rock on local musicians. Hunters and Collectors recorded Jaws of Life (the best album of their early avant-funk period) with Conny Plank in Can's Weilerswist studio in 1983 in an attempt to draw from the eroticized sonic energies their heroes conjured in that space. Here the Hunters produced ‘Betty’s Worry (or The Slab)’, the weirdest pop single about whistling in the wheatfield ever released. As an example of cultural symbiosis it’s second to none, transplanting the driving Czukay/Liebezeit rhythm section from ‘You Doo Right’ into an Antipodean ambience of pub football chants, soul horn charts and Sharpie dance stylization. The final section of the video is an ever-dissolving montage of POV shots from the hood of singer Mark Seymour's car as he drives out of the city into rural environs. It’s probably the most simple, potent metaphor yet for the Aussie yearning for absolute space. Anywhere: nowhere.
The inspiration wasn't all one way. Tangerine Dream leader Edgar Froese recorded 'Maroubra Bay' for his 1975 solo album Epsilon in Malaysian Pale and his 1983 release Pinnacles was similarly inspired by Australia's outback geography. There’s a heritage of Berlin School-inspired electronica that can be traced back to Cybotron (Steven Maxwell Von Braud’s 70s prog project, not the later Detroit techno group of that name). A national artistic strength has been to make the tyranny of distance work for us: an interstitial creative position where imported metals are forged into new amalgams; to wit, the pre-emptive grunge psych of Kim Salmon’s Scientists and Surrealists or the more exploratory end of the post-punk scene - Essendon Airport, Scattered Order, Pel Mel. Minimalism, drone and jazz fusion are historically American genres that have also fed into our Anglo-European musical tradition. Eira’s ‘Spinning Fixtures’ from the (In) volume is Emeralds-style ambient bliss combining Ummagumma-era Richard Wright's echo dancing Farfisa tone with early Conny Plank-era Cluster phase wave sculpture.
(In)
Economists raise concerns about the normalisation of working-from-home arrangements; but which normal are we looking forward to from this point in liminal time - covid normal, pre-covid, or some hypernormalised amalgam? ‘Southern Sahul (Union Song)’, Amby Downs’ opening track on Solitary Wave (In) is a vaporwave ode to the value of unions in a pre-remote employment age; a plea for organised over atomised labour. It’s nearly nine stultifying minutes of doom drone – synth or guitar tones stretched into a fuzzy ambient hum that stretches from shoegaze to atmospheric black metal. A loopy, Sisyphean progression; a sampled voice, detuned/stretched. A roughly middle-aged Australian male discusses the importance of unions to the formation of democratic societies. “Unions are not perfect, but they have made this country and continue to make this country a better place and a better economy.”
The following track, Lortica's 'Music for Friends', by contrast, has a misty, bittersweet melancholia reminiscent of Canadian ambient synth pioneers Syrinx and the neo-exotica side of The Makers of the Dead Travel Fast. Tzekin's 'Solar Cutter', by contrast again, is sepulchral New Age/dark ambient meditation, an endless chord sequence with radical spatial transformation in its second half. Tasmania’s Aqrn provides seraphic drone glow: Ebowed guitars/strings create shimmer shapes that harmonize and drift apart in what is the compilation’s closest approximation of splendid isolation. Even Alvin Lucier would consider these five and a half minutes of standing wave nirvana over too soon. Brad Harkan's ‘Archways’ is an altogether spikier harmonic affair. Sine tones in slow decay, guitar lines (alternately clear tone and volume swelled anti-attack). Fia Fiell's ‘Middle Path' has Basic Channel/Pole kosmiche dubscape rumble split into glitchy keyboard patterns, fading down then re-emerging to become lucid dreamt Reichian E2-E4 minimal house. ‘Just Before The Rain’ by Happy Axe (multi-instrumentalist Emma Kelly) is probably the most effortlessly beguiling track on this volume. A water colour impression fashioned from delayed violin, alternately played pizzicato-style and bowed, combined with Julianna Barwick/Julia Holter/Bjork-flavoured vocal loops. Alexis Weaver's ‘Paranoia In The Bush’ is psychogeographical field recordings of a rural/suburban environment, its cicada buzzsaws and granular blowfly trajectories. The Chris Watson school of audiographic research applied to conjure the unease of Australia's liminal zones.
Bolt Gun's ‘Dragged to the Wood Pile’ opens the second volume with moody ambient orchestration. It could be an excerpt from the score for something like Wolf Creek (a film whose soundtrack was in itself a showcase for Australian experimental artists like David Brown and Alan Lamb). It's a reminder that cultural cross-fertilization is alive and well in soundtrack work - i.e. expatriate composer Ben Frost scoring German science fiction/horror series Dark for Netflix. Contemplating that show's similarities to Stranger Things, the American series whose title theme recalls Tangerine Dream's 1980s soundtracking heyday, provides further solidity to this compilation's predominant mood of hauntological solipsism.
Out is a 14-track ear party for post-lockdown celebration only mildly broken up by Nina in Ecstasy's version of ‘Party’, a mutant industrialized version of Autotuned R&B ooze. Alex White’s ‘Transaction 1’ features Escherian synth timbre like a discombobulated steel drum ensemble. Marcus Whale's 'What Worth?' is three and a half minutes of dream pop broken up with slabs of J. G. Thirwell's theatrically reconfigured industrial techno. Moon Sign Gemini's ‘004’ is old school Omni Trio-style breakbeat with orchestra patches.
Breaking the tracks down into thumbnail sketches like this doesn't do them justice, highlighting a flaw in New Weird Australia's marketing of this compilation. It's a series of skillfully rendered tropes rather than music that really addresses the pandemic age and its impact on music creation. If music is created in bedroom studios to begin with, how does isolation make a difference to its production? Solitary Wave doesn't convey iso-experience in a way that matches the zeitgeist condensation of Fiona Apple's Fetch the Bolt Cutters (in truth, the result of a lengthy production period that predates the pandemic by at least four years). Only the final track on (In), A Country Practice's 'The Inundation into our Room (Tape Saturation)' directly references what is becoming normalized experience: the impact of extreme weather events on isolated Australian homes. The evocation of the violence of a repressed absolute space helps give sonic form to the unease underlying Solitary Wave (In) and (Out).
(C) Text: Jon Kromka 2020
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