Badaboum In The Vacant Valley

Happy New Year! Thought I would do the whole two birds/one stone thing on the first day of 2016 and talk about Vacant Valley and Bruit Direct Disques releases...

Let's start with Bruit. I posted about some previous releases the other week (The Frightening Lights and Wonderfuls), but the current release is the 1st LP from French all-girl outfit Badaboum. It's a hard one to describe without getting your ears dirty and diving right in. It's eerie - high-pitched, elongated, distorted vocals that play with and subvert several languages, mournful B-movie organ, percussion that goes from wind-chime irregularity to tropical punk insistence, deliberately swerving from any given holding pattern. Imagine if Trash Kit took a bunch of sweltering Quaaludes while holed up in an Alpine chalet against their will, listening to the B-52s while listening to a cassette language translator on a Walkman with the batteries dying, with dwindling food and water - and maybe Badaboum would be the result...maybe.  The bizarre thing? The shifting veils of madness are hypnotic and ultimately a lot of fun. I'm getting my head around it - you should too.



Australian champions of the damaged sonic underworld, Vacant Valley, are priming for another large, eccentric year, so before we unveil their undertakings in the upcoming months, I thought I would shine a sickly light on three of last year’s releases that deserve further scrutiny (and you can get all three here).

In chronological order, we have Melbourne solo artist Squirrel Pancake (AKA Jen Tait of Go Genre Everything amongst other acts). She has taken a fuzz-fucked approach to askew song structures, giving semblances of convention before blasting it with overzealous strumming, flailing distortion that is shaking under its own dereliction, and capsizing the ship with bolts of guitar shredding in the more literal sense. Every song seems to have been edited to frustrate – the long songs far too long, the shorter tracks dissipating before they really dig in. In some ways this is the charm – a fever dream that traces over and eradicates the skeleton, a double-vision of perceived and actual happenstance. Deconstruction as destruction. ‘Wigs & Ruffles’ sits best with me – this is no-wave meltdown, 80s Gordon/Moore style – but the rest sits precariously in that nether region between art and artifice. It stays on the right track almost by sheer will – Squirrel Pancake maintains an obtuse animosity that manages to perturb, staving off the apathy enough to be something worthwhile, even if it’s in your dreams/nightmares.

Brisbane has had some garrulous member in the VV stable (Per Purpose, Psy Ants, Cured Pink), and Bad Intentions now joins them. Everybody’s Doing It showcases the warping talents of Nicola Morton (Club Sound Witches, ) and Rebecca Hlodich. The cassette is made up of recordings from two performances at the sadly now defunct Real Bad Music space (which Morton co-ran), one of the last bastions of outlier music left in Brisbane, back in 2013, and it is two sides of a sonically fractious coin. ‘She’s Onto It’ is a metallic industrial lullaby, distorted lyrics coming through a distorted Dynamike (so it sounds), astral projection into the very outer limits, that invariably starts to fray and unravel, spluttering to many false stops before sifting the corrosive layers away, leaving low-level murmuring (from the crowd) to slowly replace the space. ‘Don’t Take It Personally’ is even less constructed in some ways (a misnomer as both sets seem to be largely improvised), guitar and drumming so out of sync (not just with each other but what equates to actually playing) that what starts out like two musically-base children strapping into instruments at Allen’s Music for an eighteen minute flurry of hands and feet, making noise because, becomes a little more – almost an epiphany just before it fully forms, a realisation dawning – the Moorooka Mile equivalent of the monolith scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, perhaps? It’s something that doesn’t hang as well as the first half, but posits that the physical experience would have been far more rewarding.

Finally we have Kompact Development. It seems Adelaide bands don’t like their C’s (another band from this crowd is Kash Konverters). The outlet for Freya Adele (from the aforementioned band as well as Theta and Botox) ​is both the most abrasive and cohesive of the three releases, an industrial Commodore-64 space battle within the blood. What? ‘Harr’ opens up and stretches for over twenty minutes, spraying a trancelike sonic adhesive over you, captivating in its stuttering remnants of a synthesised kosmiche march, tape-coiled bleeps and Cold-War computer code rolling forth in two-dimensional industrial theatricality. It manages to sound like the beats are the only constant, traversing time, space and variable technologies, warped and manipulated wherever it lands before scurrying through another wormhole to another time/head space. I actually thought this was brilliant – and seeing as the month has been top-loaded with (admittedly excellent) guitar pop for me, such a jolt of decomposing electricity was a pleasant shock. The other three, much more digestible yet still cold and anarchic tracks follow in its stead – ‘Cole’ is a robotic Goth Wave shudder, crudely executed, the vocals called spectrally forth with deadpan ice; ‘Diet’ is a metallic, eye-popping nightmare, a hyper-industrial fever with Pazuzu appearing in blocked, excruciating increments; ‘Nore’ a dot-matrix-and-internet-dial-up annihilation of nerve endings.

An Excessive Escape From Brisbane

Matt Kennedy has stepped away from the downer pop dirges for a brief time to slave over a cheap keyboard in his bedroom for the better half of last year, come out digitised as Excess. His self-titled and Sciatic Dance Party EPs were impressive, but now he has a proper release on his hands - Escape From Brisbane, out on Virtual Cool. Kennedy's voice is decidedly absent here, in its place a plethora of Brisbane musicians step up to the mike. Members of Blank Realm, Multiple Man, Gravel Samwidge, Clag, Primitive Motion, Wonderfuls, Cured Pink - the list goes on. The concept is to create warped narratives of a dystopian Brisbane, a retro-futurist time capsule of a world not that far removed from our own. Kennedy has made his appreciation for John Carpenter scores known in the past, and this is a clear touchstone with Excess (the title Escape From Brisbane alone aping the Snake Plissken classic), but these one-off collaborations provide for compelling ingenuity on their own. Personal favourites include the loquacious yet edgily paranoid ramblings of Gravel Samwidge's Mark Spinks on 'They Have Too Much To Lose' (also showcasing his deft turns of phrase), the forlorn romance of the cyberpunk trudge of the Campion bros' 'Home', and the typically dour Bobby Bot (Wonderfuls) brings us a wistful future in 'Tunnel Vision'. As most concept albums are wont to do, some tracks don't necessarily go anywhere, but again that is sometimes the greatest fear of a dystopian future - the futility and serrated harshness of inescapable banality.

All Day Breakfast comp

 

Midday Music is a compilation showcasing much of Brisbane’s underground music scene was put out last year on cassette. Handcrafted (featuring tactile “fried eggs” – white and yellow Blu-tac, on the outer sleeve) and collated by 4ZZZ presenter Makeda Zucco and her project All Day Breakfast, outlet for the documentation and exploration of music and that which pertains to it, the 25-track compilations covers the gamut, from experimental synth pop (Shooga, Brainbeau, Scraps), nihilist rock aggression (Per Purpose, Sewers, Slug Guts), avante-garde noise (Cured Pink, Sky Needle, Multiple Man), unhinged guitar pop (Blank Realm, Heart Flew, Old Growth Cola), slacker malaise downers (Kitchens Floor, Martyr Privates)… In fact, although there are a few bands on the release (X In O, Fig, Perpetual Nervousness) that I haven’t actually caught or even heard much of, the cross section of bands here is pretty indicative of what I immerse myself in here. It is all lo-fi recordings, as you can imagine, but if ever there was a document detailing much of the diversity of the scene (without going into the Long Gone, Lofly or Lost Race crews), this is a mighty fine one.

 

Unfortunately all the cassettes are sold out, but you can download the compilation for free here. Do so – there are some artists here that never get exposure, either because of their standing, their sound or because they never put out that much music for private consumption – then get out and about, supporting these bands in the live arena.

Knee Chin – Thrall Of It All
Greg Boring - Tomb
Cannon – I Should Be In A Fucking Museum

Psy Ants Bite Their Tongues and Disappear

 

Psy Ants were part of the first ever Sonic Masala Presents… shows back in October 2011. I had originally asked Per Purpose to play, but Joe (drums) was in America with Kitchens Floor. Glen the guitarist instead offered his “other” band, which was of course the noise rock trio, and they tore the place apart with a visceral performance that polarised the audience (the other two artists were the broken folk of Charles Curse and the wonky indie sweep of Nova Scotia – hence the beginning of the eclectic lineups that were inevitably to follow). I managed to catch them play one more show after that, but that’s it – the band have called it a day, preferring to focus on other bands.

At least we managed to get something physical out of them in the form of Bit Tongue Prik (out through Vacant Valley). It’s all saw-toothed, angular anger and bile, melodrama for the schizophrenics, shapes shifting in rust-gilded twitches and spasms. It’s ugly stuff indeed, David Yow masturbating over decapitated images of the Rapemen. Its broken, no reason to fix it, just listen, eat glass and move on.

Grab Bit Tongue Prik here.

Psy Ants – Spike
Psy Ants – Deny Flesher

Dying On Planes Is The Deep Future

Controversial headline, no? No. Brisbane noise improv outfit Die On Planes have put an album together called The Deep Future, a compendium of recorded works from 2006-2012. Its pretty fucking rad. The funny thing is, you will never hear these guys play em. They are improv, dummy! But it gives a great representation of what these guys do. I wish they played more shows, rather than build guitars, play in other bands and live in Goondiwindi.

The Deep Future can be got here. Also, hassle them to play a Sonic Masala show every chance you get. I need more dumb, sloppy psych/doom meanderings in my life.

Also, it's a whiles away, but the boys are playing a great show supporting Melbourne's True Radical Miracle July 1, apparently at the Step Inn. Others include Per Purpose, Stag and Cured Pink. Head over here for deets.

Die On Planes - False Memory Syndrome
Die On Planes - A Life Without Time

Welcome To Vacant Valley

The tops dude behind Vacant Valley in Melbourne has been putting out some amazing underground releases in the past couple years, such as Jouissance, Cured Pink and Penguins. There are some choice releases on the way too, two of which I'm am super psyched about.

Brisbane noise trio Psy Ants will soon be calling it a day, but not before unleashing onto the world their first (and obviously only) release, the Bit Tongue Prik 12". They played the first ever Sonic Masala Presents, and promptly blew everything away. It'll be sad to see them go, but at least this means there will be a physical keepsake that doesn't require sneaking into their bathroom to get locks of hair.

Also bringing out a 12" is Melbourne act Pop Singles. They have been peddling their guitar pop smut for a while with a few cassettes and such out there, but All Gone will be their first LP. I've only heard this track off the album but suffice to say I like where it is heading.

Expect to hear more when the waxen goodies come out, but until then, enjoy the tracks below!

Psy Ants - Spike
Pop Singles - All Gone