Tag Archives: Cured Pink

Reviews

Beautiful Error States: Soft Power’s If You Come Around reviewed

soft-power-if-you-come-aroundThere is no room on this Soft Power record; it is thick and overripe. It feels like these songs have sat in a moist basement for a long time, and through doing so grown larger, furier and more complicated.

Andrew McLellan, Joel Stern and Josh Watson are all involved in this. All featured in Greg Boring, and there is a fair bit in common between the two entities. Soft Power is softer and less wacky, but it’s also stranger than Greg Boring. This is no small feat because Greg Boring seemed to pride itself on being strange. Instead, it was wacky. I’m sure you appreciate the difference.

Soft Power has the clarity of pop music thanks to the vocals of Sophia Brous, who is the fourth member of the group on this record (Soft Power is usually just McLellan and Stern). I suppose that is why the group is called Soft Power: its pop veneer appears eager to please at first but there are less scrutable motives at play. A macabre streak underpins these bright synths and illustrous vocals, undermining the pop elements in an unusual way. ‘Siren’, for example, seems to break apart at times. The effect is like textures in a virtual landscape wavering, and the song resembles a beautiful error state. Brous sounds like she might belong to another song altogether.

That is what’s interesting about Soft Power. The music seems poised to illustrate a particular kind of 21st century technology anxiety, but it does so in a more subtle way than most. It seems to relish the minutiae of strange systems by humanising sonics we’re used to hearing in more sequenced, rigid environments. It is strange to hear a song like ‘Wundering’, with its drowsy synthetic pulses, and notice the imperfections: how the tempo shifts upwards or down accidentally at times, or how a note will fall out of step with the rest. These lapses breathe life into cold systems.

Soft Power’s songs sound like they have been tampered with. They sound as if they are functioning despite data corruption. Maybe instead of locked in a basement, these songs have sat on an old PC for years, across the fragmented blocks of a hard drive touched by an old virus, absorbing the surrounding data. During a year which has seen several overtly dark synth pop records (Nun, Mob), Soft Power is frightening in a more fascinating and inadvertent way, but it is also very beautiful.

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Soft Power’s If You Come Around is available through All Day Breakfast Enterprises.

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New Music

Listen: new Redundancy tapes

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Melbourne tape label Redundancy has just released a handful of new tapes, and all are worth an investigation. With the exception of a Cured Pink tape and another that label operator Jarrod Zlatic is personally involved in, these Redundancy releases feel salvaged from the more remote corners of Australia’s urban centers. Stuff that seems pretty detached from anything else happening in our major city’s respective scenes.

First case in point is Krakatoa, a Melbourne trio with a strong ’70s British prog / jazz-rock inclination. The influence is so pronounced that they’ve used their important Redundancy record deal to release a tape comprising two covers of Soft Machine’s ‘Pennyhitch’, as well as two renditions of ‘Wayfaring Stranger’. Zlatic tells me the group have a new LP finished which features all original material. “Dark kraut/progressive stuff and some cold electronic collages,” in Jarrod’s words.

I’m not sure how well known Blanque Cheque is down in Melbourne, but this new (and I suspect only) tape through Redundancy is true visionary material, out-of-nowhere deadbeat mana straight from the gods of sloth. According to Zlatic, the members used to play in a “completely outer-space nu-metal outfit” back in the early ’00s in Melbourne’s outer suburbs.

Nowadays they’re focusing on sedated outer-space improvisational rock strewn with Australian pop culture effluvia (you know, harsh jump cuts to real estate radio advertisements etc), and the result is probably one of the better weirdo rock albums I’ve heard come out of Australia for years. I’m in awe of it. I’m gonna get in touch with these guys for an interview soon, but unfortunately in the meantime there are no sound samples. The band has described the tape as their “magnum opus on the post-humanist landscape of contemporary Australian suburbia and the failure of the ACCC.” So just buy it.

Krakatoa and Blanque Cheque are the standouts from the new Redundancy batch, based solely on my having never heard them before. The other two tapes include releases by Cured Pink and Demyster. The latter teams label operator Zlatic (who also plays in Fabulous Diamonds, unless you hadn’t made the connection) with Tarquin Manek of Bum Creek, resulting in strange early electronic inspired atmospheres that waver between moody and bracing. As for the Cured Pink tape, it’s the only of the new Redundancy batch I haven’t got a hold of yet but there’s a sound sample below. The Cured Pink 7 inch from earlier this year is still sinking in.

You can order the tapes here.

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Reviews

Greg Boring – Heavy Syrup (LP)

greg-boring-heavy-syrupGreg Boring’s debut LP always sounds like it’s winding down. It’s in a perpetual state of ending. Featuring members of Sky Needle and Cured Pink, Heavy Syrup is interesting for what it seems to confirm about a certain stylistic inclination in Australian underground music. Like so many other active bands at present – Mad Nanna and the recent Girls Girls Girls LP come immediately to mind – Greg Boring sounds utterly exhausted.

Greg Boring is colorful, improvised, synth-driven pop music. It’s delivered in an affable enough fashion, and sometimes it even sounds cheerful. Sarah Byrne is one of the country’s best – and strangest – vocalists. Although she never deigns to audibly exert herself here (in contrast to her work with Sky Needle), her voice is preternaturally restless and expressive, even while it’s threaded with a dreary narcolepsy. On Heavy Syrup, Byrne is accompanied by low-tempo drum machines and vintage synth tones. Together, these components usually result in either an unsteady drunken sway or a last-gasp motorik pulse. The music lolls at a very slow, stumbling pace with only a couple of exceptions.

Why does it sound so slight, though, so unstable? The drum machine in particular chuffs like a dying steam train, while the synth melodies dandy about with a staunch ambivalence to timing. At the rock bottom end of the mix, ugly drones reverberate like a Casio keyboard running out of battery power. Greg Boring’s otherwise affable pop music feels like it’s coming unbolted, like the screws are slowly rattling out. Greg Boring isn’t dismantled, it’s dismantling. Greg Boring hasn’t destroyed – in the way you might say Harry Pussy or The Dead C have destroyed, for example – but rather it’s destroying. Very carefully though! It’s like they’re picking it apart.

That’s why they remind me of Mad Nanna, because despite there being very little in common in terms of instrumentation, Greg Boring sounds like pop music winding down gently. It’s like this huge structure, writhing with epochal energy, has been built to its greatest extent and now we’re taking it apart, placing the pieces back in their box but nursing them affectionately before we do, remembering what they did when they were part of something greater. Greg Boring is quite literally, deconstructed pop.

This band sounds very aware of its unimportance and inconsequentiality. They make pop music with a dogged lack of meaning, all hot wind. The neighbourhood is full and heavily gentrified at that, so let’s leave it alone. Let’s let the Greg Borings of the world have their due. Heavy Syrup sounds like a band almost giving up on their form, but in doing so, they stumble upon something rare and fascinating.

Label: Critical Heights
Release date: February 2013

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Reviews

Psy Ants – Bit Tongue Prik (LP)

Psy Ants released this LP a couple of weeks ago and then disbanded, so this is the only record they’ll ever have, and you’ll probably never see them play live again. Consisting members of Per Purpose, Knee Chin and Cured Pink, the Brisbane trio formed around the duo of Aiden Hilcher and Mitchel Perkins, and eventually recruited Glen Schenau on guitar. They played the type of noise rock that sounds life-changing after about four (maybe five) longnecks.

The record plays out like a 20-minute rush of ugly texture: flaked with rust and bluntly serrated at the edges. Mitchel Perkins yells/sings like he was dropped as an infant, and the ensemble itself is unusually technical for a group like this, changing tempo and tack several times within the space of a two minute tune. ‘Belts & Ties’ is an exception: a short and leery chant that approaches something almost frightening in its nastiness. Elsewhere, foreign elements like chimes (?) make ‘Toska’ a little bit weirder than your run-of-the-mill “angular” noise rock tune.

Overall, it’s true reprobate filth. If someone played this record to you without saying what it is, you’d probably guess it was made in Brisbane. Bit Tongue Prik consists eight songs, and each is a mess of feedback and yelling. You could slot these guys on a bill with Slug Guts, early Per Purpose and nowadays Sewers, and you’d have a very… thematically consistent show indeed. That’s where I imagine this group would shine – playing to a room of fellow imbeciles. This is a serviceable enough record, very good for what it is, but all three members are doing more remarkable stuff now.

Label: Vacant Valley
Release date: November 2012

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Features, Reviews

Scum Mecca #2

Contained here are seven reviews: six tapes and one 7 inch flexi-disc. Scum Mecca is the name of the column, an irregular feature on Crawlspace’s schedule. This is the second. Cooper Bowman writes it. This month the column covers Cock Safari, Teen Ax, Cured Pink, Matthew Phillip Hopkins, Hyperspace Vision, Tony Irving, Pleasure Bros. and Tailings. We’ve provided audio samples and images where possible, but most of the time it wasn’t possible. Sorry.

Cock Safari / Teen Ax – Split CS (Street Muscle)

This sounds like Teen Ax and Cock Safari playing each other’s hits. Cock Safe does so live at Black Wire, in what should’ve been a Cocks With Wings set. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the audience instead copped a short barrage of contacted mic cymbal fuckery through busted amplification from the sole, glaze-eyed Cock. Sounds kinda like Teen Ax’s The Danny Sessions Sessions release in its unbridled feedback and obnoxiousness. The Tweens sound closer to their cocky counterpart, due to radio interference prodding in and out of their harsh vibes. Look at how many times it says Cock in this review, if this doesn’t offend you then the lowest-possible-grade smut in which this tape comes surrounded probably will.

(Ed – the cover art shown above is saturated with white because it’s pretty rude. See the proper version here. Not safe for anywhere.)

Cured Pink – Dudi Bumi CS (Redundancy)

Dudi Bumi comprises Andrew McLennan’s recordings while in Indonesia on some sort of artist residency malarkey last year. McLennan has enlisted the more than capable services of several local noisemakers throughout, many of whom may be involved in the Yes/No Wave collective. The first ‘piece’ begins with excessively pounding drums, an electric current of a drone underneath and occasional heavily delayed / deranged vocals. Basically this is TG’s Discipline reprised in Indonesia. The sound reverberates around the Yes/No Klub in a riotous cacophony before it de-evolves into a mess of scrape n’ shout. Much of the rest of the tape is a collaged blend, divided between more abstract vocal movements and a good amount of industrial chart-toppers. The flip starts with a genuinely fuckin’ strange organ-driven ditty, mixed with vocal sounds of what sound like I imagine being consumed feels like. This rates with the Sabbatical release from a couple of years back as one of the most consistently interesting CP listens.

Matthew Phillip Hopkins – Small Entry s/sided flexi 7” (Horizon Pages)

Small Entry is the first audio release on Melbourne vanity printing press, Horizon Pages. In what is likely his first solo release since the dissolution of the Bad Tables / Lamp Puffer nom de plume from a few years back, Hopkins crafts an opaque web of atmospherics by way of (according to the cover) tapes, keyboards, voices and feedback. The lone track here is closer to the dark void created by Hopkins in new project Half High than anything done by NOTV. There are hints of the electronic arpeggiations of Four Door, but this is an entirely murkier beast altogether. The flexi comes packaged with a broadsheet poster of Hopkins’ art and ‘digitized responses’ by the guy who does the label, so it is more of an ‘item’ than a stand-alone release per se, but still hits the spot nicely.

Hyperspace Vision – Starfire CS (Magik Crowbar)

Obviously extending on from Fabio Umberto’s love of italo, under Hyperspace Vision he makes the kinda space-disco knowledge of which is usually reserved for Europeans with impeccable hygiene habits and high Discogs seller ratings. Both tracks here are simultaneously epic, cheesy and immediately addictive. The title-track begins with an ominous synth-tone before leading into a sweaty galactic mess, replete with a subtly vocoded-sounding refrain of its title. Impressively, Starfire sounds like it could have originated from a rooted paradox of Italy, the 1970’s and the deep reaches of zeta reticuli.

Tony Irving – Vox Cyclops 21/05/11 s/sided CS (Confirmation Tapes)

On Power Waters Records, uh, Confirmation Tapes comes a new live recording from the hallowed halls of Vox Cyclops, the much-missed Newcastle record store and halfway house. This is the first I’ve heard of the (apparently) much revered English-born / Queensland-based multi-instrumentalist. Heavy feedback, ecstatically loose drumming and occasional geet dirges congeal into a mess of freeish noise. If this is you’re kinda thing, then you will dig, if you don’t then you won’t.

Pleasure Bros – Pleasure Bros CS (Self-Released)

More z-grade filth from one of the tainted minds behind Teen Ax, Tony McKee. In the T n’ A tradition, Pleasure Bros is excessively abrasive and indecently packaged. I listened to this with one of my mates slightly toasted while there happened to be an earthquake going on around us. Said mate tried to convince me the reason that I was feeling weird was due to the coarse static being issued from his tape deck, but a phone call from my childhood pal seeing if I had survived confirmed that there was another, more likely reason. The earthquake was actually pissweak, this tape isn’t though. The Pleasure Bros nearly had me convinced that music could be physically displacing and psychologically manipulative. Too bad, Tony could have made a killing selling it to the CIA.

Tailings – Untitled CS (Mazurka Editions)

Tailings is a Newcastle duo comprised of Jason Campbell and Kerry Robinson. Preceding this, Tailings had released one cassette on Campbell’s Eternal Solitude imprint, exhibiting them in a more formative juncture than the fully evolved organism on show here. Previously skirting the edges of harsh noise, this untitled cassette instead finds them comfortably situated in a smokestack spewing industrial zone. It’s easy to fetishise the decrepit, post-industry weirdness of Newcastle, but the comparison couldn’t be more satisfyingly apt here.

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