First Impressions 025: Spliced-up jazz-funk bubbles, milky-warm wobble tones, campfire goth, existential indie and more.
Initial vibes on new music
Hello,
One of Australia's largest music industry players, Mushroom Group, has launched a new agency called Mushroom Connect. Aiming to provide specialist talent management, influencer marketing, and artist representation, Mushroom Connect will promote 'talent-led digital content'. Their goal is to connect clients with brands they genuinely love, ensuring authenticity for an audience that's wise to conventional marketing tactics. Mushroom Connect will work towards this goal with partners including Disney, Google, Netflix, Maybelline, and McDonald's. One client said in the announcement that “[the] team’s support has been off the charts.” There’s something else they could have mentioned that’s off the charts – Australian music. Not a single Australian release of 2023 made that year’s top 100 singles or albums. The top 10 Australian singles at the start of July featured two classic AC/DC tunes, three Kid Laroi tracks reaching back as far as 2021, and a decade-plus old hit I hear exclusively, and often, in supermarkets (Vance Joy’s Riptide). While there’s been much handwringing on this fact in some sections of the industry, Mushroom Connect knows what constitutes the surface authenticity of the Australian music charts and how they’re measured – streaming, and what the main services foreground, along with infinite physical variants released by monolithic artists feature heavily - isn’t going to help who they work with. What this means for the future of the Australian music industry, comparatively small with many players jockeying for space, is that the music practically becomes secondary. In a 12-month period where Taylor Swift had 36 singles in the Australian top 40, relevance is the highest measure of success. Fostering transparency, availability, vulnerability – any points of connection - this work used to be done deep in the guts of the song and cradled by the critical mass. Maybe this is partly why older songs are continually seeping into the wider consciousness. I miss it.
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OK, let’s go:
Small Medium Large – SML: This quintet of relentlessly dynamic players from the crossbreeding intersections of Los Angeles music hit the studio to splice and spice up extended improvisations out of their debut four-night residency. Invoking the playful quirks of Haruomi Hosono’s mechanised funk outings and the bubbling space where Herbie Hancock slid from electric to electronic, the zing across this album is like the joyful pop of a champagne cork. Crucially, that faint plume of smoke that follows is the kind of delicate subterfuge that offers it a depth of feeling.
Coming and Going – Mas Aya: Brandon Valdivia is a prolific composer, producer, and collaborator in Canadian music, and this fifth solo work as Mas Aya comes off like a soundtrack for a fever-dreamed South American street parade. Percussion bursts out like a fireworks display from a relentlessly joyful tumble of trippy electronics, flights of brass and woodwind, sample warps, and cooing vocals colliding with a bumping tech-house drive. For all its rave action and jazzy elasticity, this is a solo project with a hive mind mentality, folding in an all-in set of guest players in a spirit leavening similar to Alice Coltrane’s collective approach to personal bliss.
Salt And Sugar Look The Same - Tim Koh & Sun An: This pair ensures their slippery pieces don’t hang around too long, a mulch of fingerpicked guitar and wobbling, staticky tones that feel like random climb, spiral and sputter of an incense cloud. (I wrote this then read the bio’s mention of incense – I know Nag Champa when I hear it) The cassette-burnout drift of Jefrey Astin’s Xiphiidae project is a kindred spirit: for both, the endpoint is revelling in the degradation of anything familiar into new patchworks of abstraction where the drift is a milky warm cradle of disquiet.
Point of Incidence – Oxherding: Missouri’s Fitz Hartwig makes gentle but generous ambience, prickled with points of intrigue in trickling field recordings through gorgeous swathes of synth melody. Over the course of these two longform pieces, Hartwig never zones out, flooding the senses with near psychedelic import as they steam forward with bursts of light, colour and movement, all the while ensuring to cradle their restful state.
Seashell Angel Lucky Charm - Armlock: It’s fascinating to hear large parts of your musical upbringing reverberate back to you from music makers today, and strangely warming when they get it right and sneak under your nostalgia guard. This Melbourne duo make that classic hushed bedroom pop that defined the axis of 90s/2000s US indie, turning on both disaffection and yearning. These songs are so willowy with spindly and pecked guitar lines, a cocked ear may be the best listening stance to reach the eloquence of its emotional heft, all surrender and awe to life’s existential charms.
You Can't Negotiate With Zombies - Caput Medusae: If you have ever imagined Ween in a collaboration with Falco for a wry tribute to darkwave, look no further than this German duo, sneering at everyone from outside the gates of mainstream society with damn fine poker faces. There’s a deadpan preen fronting all the songs on this debut album, and yet they can’t help but be catchy in the dinkiest way, with a pallor of new wave and post-punk tropes Christopher Guest and friends would be proud to summon. With track titles like Smash The System and I’ll Wear Black Til I’m Dead, Caput Medusae could just be classic fodder for the goth campfire set. Either they’re plainly quaint, or I am.
Thanks for reading.
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Andrew Khedoori is the curator of Longform Editions.
First Impressions visual by Mark Gowing.