First Impressions 039: dub panelbeating, fairytale blurs, nature transmissions and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

All I can say here is that through the week I got a lot of emals and texts with just one word: ‘classic’.

Thank you, friends.
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Ruins - 990x: Sydney producer 990x makes the dead of night his canvas to rub and bump up against with glinting surfaces and murky undertow. The piercing static hiss throughout reminds me of the steam rising up out of manholes in Taxi Driver, shadowing the film’s dank, ominous air. With muggy bass stretches sponging into watery movements that engage a Badalamenti-like sway, when 990x deposits skeletal beats, Ruins catches the same casual but deep and heavy cool of Maxinquaye-era Tricky, elevating urban claustrophobia by tracing it with a dream logic at the point of decay.

It's time my friend... - Pelican Daughters: Sydney's Andy Rantzen and Justin Brandis were core to the city's surge of DIY electronic activity from the 80s onward. As Pelican Daughters, they synthesised dub and industrial in a way that sounded more like it was recorded in a panel beater's workshop than a studio. This surprise return opens with what seems like an inspiration to turn the drip of a tap in the early hours into a brooding, doomy moodscape. Lumbering bass skanks, scorched ambience, and junkyard clang make early On-U-Sound projects sound like a Felix Da Housecat production by comparison, while field recordings — birds, market gatherings, children playing — are rendered in eerie repose, dragged into the pair’s sonic rubble and gurgling rhythms, further magnetising you into their compelling, heady daze.

Devotion Objects - Troth & Jon Collin: As if charged by currents running just beneath the Earth's surface, this new collaboration between the Swedish-based Collin and the Nipaluna duo Troth (Amelia Besseny and Cooper Bowman) forges a kinship in experiencing nature as a pure transmission of sound. Devotion Objects humbly acts in consort, its constant hum, drone, and peculiar rhythm drawing a quiet, awestruck feeling. Collin's guitar plays out in clusters of frisson, while Amelia Besseny's vocal carries the main signal of surrender to the elements. Are Besseny, Bowman, and Collin themselves the devotion objects? Whatever the case, this is a solemn undertaking of enigmatic resonance.

The Bloody Lady – claire rousay: Fairytales usually end well—good triumphs over evil, love wins, and societal order is restored. The lingering slick of slippery morals is explored in the 1980 animated film The Bloody Lady, directed by Viktor Kubai, which tells the story of the fall of Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman rumored to have tortured and murdered young girls to bathe in their blood, believing it would grant her eternal youth and beauty. While claire rousay, who now offers a new soundtrack to the film, has not typically indulged in contemplation in her work, it has never wanted for tenderness. Alongside her ventures into emo confessionals, the precision of her domestic recordings leaves little room for subterfuge—the emotional wellspring she draws from is raw and direct. Perhaps because The Bloody Lady is rooted in external material rather than her personal inner workings, it marks a turn in her work towards softness and deliberation. This shift aligns with what claire described to me as the ‘hazy and vague ethics’ of the film, which are reflected in these gauzy pieces: recurring piano motifs, tingling percussion, washed-out field recordings, and rising strings. This deceptively simple work is disarming as it blurs its coordinates, to where locating pure feeling is an elusive concept. Once again, claire finds a way to make music anything but an escape from reality.

Khonsu - Blanket Swimming: One of many projects for Kansas City producer Nicholas Maloney, his work as Blanket Swimming dates back to 2015, with this latest work coming up as a nice find on Tasmania's Perceptual Tapes, a reliable landing spot for homespun drift variations. The name might be an aqueous take on the magic carpet ride, and indeed the indeterminate flow of water features in the dissonant pitch of these two extended pieces. Named after the Ancient Egyptian god of the moon, Khonsu sees Maloney in accord with the restless cycles of nature as his muse and perhaps reflecting how the moon’s distance offers only a temporal light to capture it, with the music evoking both the fragility and comfort of our place within the void.

Thanks for reading.

PS - I’ll be skipping next week.
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Andrew Khedoori is the curator of Longform Editions.
First Impressions visual by Mark Gowing.