(06.01.08) When these three acts convened last year at Northcote Social Club, Melbourne under the auspices of Room40 head honcho, Lawrence English, 12k curator Taylor Deupree documented the proceedings. The recorded results were remastered and are now presented as an assemblage which, despite each artist’s different shades of post-, achieves an effective and cohesive flow.
First up are Solo Andata, moulding and melding a variety of shapes and forms with reconstructive sleight of hand. Theirs is the most complex of the three contributions both in its instrumentation and in its mélange of genres. As on their Fyris Swan album, the duo come on at once cinematic and pastoral, tight and expansive, incorporating something of the idiom of avant-jazz with film score elegiacs. An amalgam of instrumental samples and electronics is deployed in the creation of a 17-minute soundscape replete with nostalgic melodicism, with piano – both cool and precious – and tuned percussion much in evidence. SA’s main references would appear to be in the minimalist electro-acoustic tapestries of Apestaartje’s Mountains and the exploratory post-folk of Häpna’s Tape; put that together with something of a Scott Herren-type boho post-jazz sensibility – think Savath + Savalas rather than Prefuse 73 – and you have a handle on Solo Andata’s sound. Their piece here is in constant motion, shifting from glacial tangles of timbres, to Budd-Jarrett piano melancholics, to a sort of dissipated chamber jazz derivative; elsewhere a communion of metallophones takes up with soft drone infusions to be gently buffeted by an array of peripheral sounds from nocturnal forest hums to woody half-rhythms.
Next come Seaworthy, normally a trio, here stripped down to core member, Cameron Webb, for a 19-minute semi-improvised variation on a track from the Map in Hand album – an open gently meandering soundscape of steel-strung melodies, field recordings, and barely-there digitalia. The atmosphere of their set is at once placid and active, balancing grain and grace, tacking something of the backwoods lexicon of Loren Mazzacane Connors onto some shakier structures whittled from 12k’s lowercase grammar. The main actor, Guitar, ranges between murky low-attack/long decay reductions and brighter pickings from more familiar axe-ioms. It brings a touch of the serene side of Fripperies to a more soundtrack-ist ambiance (Ry Cooder’s Paris Texas, Vincent Gallo) – glissandos and twangs from the open country roads of Americana. A slow-motion meditative stasis occasionally gives way to quietly questing note-flurries, a somewhat insipid and over-familiar harmonic sensibility offset by a faded tonal refinement. Viewable as part of an exchange between two vital US non-mainstream musical traditions of the ’90s/’00s, Seaworthy’s reworking of that early-Kranky Windy & Carl-cum-Labradford space-guitar within microsonic pop-ambient country might be seen as a kind of payback (Kranky having been long engaged in making appropriatory inroads into 12k-land).
Taylor Deupree’s transition from austere glitch technician to new poet of drifting digi-acoustica could be traced in progress from the minimalist abstraction of Stil. to the relatively fulsome expressive soundscapes of January and beyond to Northern. His performance, concluding the set, sees him returning to former haunts, albeit with some of the endowment of his recent dalliance with a more romanticist idiom. The ambience here feels more brittle and weathered than usual, as Deupree’s sound gets downier and dirtier in live exposure, though the signature 12k template of digital discreet music is intact. Return to the minimal experimental homeland is not effected without a trace of faux-naif J-pop-isms (think Plop!) still clinging, though this element is far more palatable as blended in here. While Deupree tends towards a sparse recursive mindset, he achieves an engaging variegation with pepperings of found sounds sprinkled lightly over surface contours.
Overall, Live in Melbourne turns out to be a fitting document, providing as it does an exhibit of the State of the Art of 12k and its ambit; its organic environments, “real” instruments, and relatively ‘natural’ sonic architectures at one end, through to the more heavily digital domain, with its ‘virtual’ instrumentation, and greater degrees of DSP tweakery at the other. But this suggests a paradigmatic polarisation, commitment to whose effacement is, in fact, a distinguishing feature of this recording and of the 12k aesthetic.
Live in Melbourne is out now on 12k. [Purchase
