Tag Archives: Club Sound Witches

New Music

Watch: Club Sound Witches – Uprok

Club Sound Witches is the duo of Brisbane’s Nicola Morton (Bad Intentions) and Matt Earle (xNoBBQx), a pairing as abrasive as you’d expect from their prior projects. The video for ‘Uprok’ (a track from a forthcoming cassette on Breakdance the Dawn) is funny. A paper boat leads a camera past onlookers who are either disinterested or confused by the filming, which would be a perfectly acceptable reaction to the track itself.

‘Uprok’ is an oddity, consisting of harshly grating overtones with writhing beats plied underneath. The duo describe themselves as a techno band, but those influences are violently obscured under the aural buzzsaw that is the track’s ambience. The beats are muted too, so that it sounds like you’re loitering just outside a club with a persistent headache. When I listen to this track, I want initially to remove my headphones and walk away, but I listen anyway. It’s a very strange and appealing form of punishment.

*

‘Uprok’ will appear on a cassette release on Breakdance the Dawn, and follows a 2012 CD-R that we reviewed previously.

Standard
New Music

Listen: The Mermaids on Breakdance the Dawn

0000261905_100

[UPDATE: a free Bandcamp sampler has been released featuring the below releases + more]

Matt Earle’s Breakdance the Dawn label has a habit of releasing a generous handful of new CD-Rs and tapes at once. The pattern continues with nine new recordings, all available now through the label’s website. I’ve not heard any of them yet though a few samples have been uploaded, among them this three minute section from a new Mermaids release, which comes in the form of a VHS / CD-R release.

As we’ve pointed out before, The Mermaids is a Newcastle duo featuring Michael from Cock Safari / the Grog Pappy label, and Nick from Polyfox and the Union of the Most Ghosts. The few recordings I’ve heard from the duo vary widely. The sample below – a bed of static harried by clipped vocal samples – is dramatically different to the atmospheric synth sleep of ‘Greetings in Three Languages‘.

‘Static with clipped vocal samples’ sounds like it’d be annoying, but strangely enough, there are few sharp edges to the sample below. It’s involving and evocative. I’m not sure how the VHS format factors into the end product, but expect it to be fascinating, and probably discomforting.

As for the other new Breakdance the Dawn releases, there’s stuff by xNOBBQx, Sun of the Seventh Sister, Goods Van, The Sha, Club Sound Witches, Squiding, Bad Intentions and Statis Duo. All are available as either CD-R or tapes, except the VHS tapes of course. Buy them here. Sample the rest of them here.

Standard
Features

Photos from Fitz Fest 2013

When you go to a festival, especially one as good as the inaugural Sydney Fitz Festival, it’s very nice to go home and look at photos of it. We know this, and that’s why we’ve got a slideshow for you below. Look at that, or check out the individual photos below.

All photos of Yasmin Nebenfuhr.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Standard
Reviews

Club Sound Witches – Club Sound Witches (CD-R)

If the text-based computer games you played as a kid suddenly turned blood red and instructed you to kill your parents (with an axe, ideally), the accompanying music would sound like Club Sound Witches. Consisting Matt Earle of various Breakdance the Dawn affiliates (X Wave and Girls Girls Girls among them) and one Nicola Morton, this is the sound of old hardware rising from its obsolete dormancy to suck your stupid brain dry.

As legend has it, the synths used on this record survived a thorough washing during the 2010-11 Queensland floods. I’m not sure what specific effect this had on the instruments, but the results here definitely sound broken or breaking. Unfathomably deep bass tones calmly ooze battery acid while distant echoed murmurs roleplay the monochrome soul of the machine. Each drawn out note modulates rhythmically beneath a surface of hiss, thus creating a kind of sub-sub-basement techno for people who can only dance while on horse tranquilizer, lying down.

In some ways Club Sound Witches is reminiscent of some of Basic Channel’s more stubbornly ugly material in its relentless non-humanness. But here, technology isn’t so much the threat as it is the last thing standing. This is the sound of everything – whether powered or breathing – grinding to a halt.

Please note the CD-R edition reviewed here featured two fifteen-minute long tracks, which are tracks 3 and 4 in the playlist below.

Label: Breakdance the Dawn
Release date: June 2012

Standard