Phasing Out Exhaustion

Nothing like some exhaustion to start a Black Friday... Melbourne noise heads Exhaustion present new EP Phased Out following on from their Biker LP and their collaboration with Kris Wanders over the past 12 months. The four tracks exhibited here continues the gnarled noise in an inexorable centrifugal free fall, with added industrial destruction from Mark Barrage. The title track is the soundtrack to subterranean tribal law, pagan horror made out of metal and glass, sepulchral figures of feedback fury. Unhinged? Not really; the propulsive metronomic nature of the drums/machine underscore the moans and howls. 'Colleague' offers more abhorrent synthetic scree and anodyne mantras - it fits in with the blackened minimal maximalism that My Disco have taken to their aesthetic on current album Severe, or Perth's Snowman at their basest. These scorched rhythm onslaughts are dissected in the B-side of the EP, with wunderkinds Mikey Young and Stacey Wilson (in Rites Wild mode) taking the reins. Young's 'Phased Out' is laid out like some of the Europunk leather techno that has been entrancing the Australian gutters of recent years (think Multiple Man or Pleasure Symbols, actually cold in Berlin, more earnest, less grimy, more creepy). Rites Wild takes Exhaustion into darker waves, sounding like the techno drone of Yaws or the darkest, desirous regions of Not Not Fun. Put out by Austin label 12XU, Phased Out is yet another transformative experience from one of the best bands in Australia.

Wandering Exhaustion

Last year Exhaustion released their second LP Biker, and it was easily one of my favourite releases of the year. So when I saw this drop into my inbox (on my birthday no less) I was immediately excited. But as you may have noticed, Sonic Masala has been fairly quiet the last month and a half, so I haven’t been able to describe the calamity that unfolded once I started playing the damn thing. You see, these psych rock marauders aren’t just whipping out an extension to their work – this is a blown out, visceral collaboration with Dutch-born tenor saxophonist Kris Wanders, strongly versed in the heady days of early free improv in Europe, having smashed holes through convention alongside the likes of Peter Brotzmann (seriously what isn’t this guy doing these days? Must be one of the busiest men on the planet right about now…) However there is a sense of dynamism on this one-sided LP that eschews each participant’s previous outpourings. There are swells of cathartic metal clang and wind, a caterwaul of desperate release; and there are troughs of tetchy silence, interspersed with false starts and tics that underscores the nervous energy each player brings to the proceedings. It wouldn’t surprise me if Endless Melt had infused sweat and blood into the wax as each record was pressed, so evident is the fever that this collaboration captures. Duncan Blatchford doesn’t allow for his guitar to do all the hissing and spewing though – his vocal interjections are guttural, impulsive, primal breaths, grunts and pants, a rebirth borne of exertion, viscera and saliva. Wanders’ punctuations are speed-of-light ripostes through the defences, at once wondrous and debilitating. It all makes for a heady melange of impulses and expulsions, sewn together by sinew and devilish determination. Grab it here.