SALLY SELTMANN - ‘HEART THAT’S POUNDING’
Published: Music Australia Guide #75, April 2010.

Sally Seltmann
Heart That’s Pounding
****1/2
Shock

Heart That’s Pounding comes from fine songwriting stock. The colour-drenched, lo-fi pop vistas of Sally Seltmann’s debut as New Buffalo, The Last Beautiful Day (2004) and the elegiac piano balladry of 2007’s Somewhere, anywhere saw her lauded as the leader of a new generation of female singer-songwriters. It’s no mistake that one of Seltmann’s songs – 1234, performed by Canadian songstress Feist – became a global hit. Released under her own name, Seltmann’s third album signals a reinvention for the Sydney-raised songstress. This stunning, self-assured piece of pop music is not only her most convincing and maximal, but perhaps her most complex oeuvre to date. From its luminous opener Harmony to My Heartbeat, the record glows with full-bodied arrangements, glimmering organ, synth and percussive dynamics, and some of the most heart-melting vocal melodies you’ll hear. There’s no more striking example than Dream About Change. Indeed, Seltmann has never written a song so vibrant, its circular vocal hook and rattling drums flourishing into a soaring, angelic chorus harmony. That said, the fragile femininity for which Seltmann made her hame is still written all over this record. Sketches like Happy and I Tossed a Coin belie vocal lines so delicate and weightless they could float away. The difference here is that Seltmann seems unafraid to be herself. Where her work as New Buffalo seemed reticent, timid and girlish, Heart That’s Pounding throbs with feeling and expression. Seltmann has created a record that is feminine, romantic and sentimental – but unabashedly, radiantly so. 

DAN RULE 

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RHODES’ LONG JOURNEY
Published: Music Australia Guide #75, April 2010.

UK songwriter and former Lamb frontwoman Lou Rhodes wrote her third solo album One Good Thing in the wake of her sister’s death. She tells Dan Rule of finding traces of hope in the darkness.

One Good Thing is really stripped in terms of its arrangements and dynamics. It feels like there’s no hiding on this one.
“That was a real priority for me. I guess I’m part of a long tradition of singer-songwriters and there is always a kind of cathartic element in what we do. Obviously, much of the record was written through a very difficult time and I think writing a lot of these songs got me through a that time. But I hope what comes through with this record is the positive end of that whole struggle – plunging into the darkness, but kind of coming through the other side.”

The songs that bookend the record reflect that. There’s a real darkness, but it’s more about peering back from precipice and seeing the potential and possibility for happiness and love and so on.
“Yeah, it’s true. I mean, a long time ago a really good friend of mine said to me, ‘Do you realise you write all these really tragic love songs? They probably had a profound effect on your reality’. And I had never really thought of it that way, that the way you write could really affect the way you live. I guess I thought about art impersonating reality, instead of the other way around.”

I found it interesting that you recorded One Good Thing with Andy Barlow, your former partner in Lamb.
“He’s got a lot of lovely analogue gear and he’s got a lovely space and we get along really well, obviously, so it just made sense in many ways. I had my concerns about it, because obviously in the past we’ve worked together on Lamb stuff and I wasn’t quite sure how easy, particularly for him, to just step back a little. But he was absolutely brilliant and really very generous in the way that he facilitated me making the record that I wanted to make.”

Was recording in that analogue environment really important to you?
Oh yeah, definitely. Like if you think of how Nick Drake recorded Five Leaves Left, recording as much as possible live and in one take and recording guitar and vocal together on tape, I just feel it gives a record a lot more integrity and a very different, softer fidelity. It’s almost like another world to working in digital.”

Do you feel that the Lamb’s music tied you to a time and place more than your solo material, which you could argue is far more timeless?
“Yeah, and I was yearning to do something really simple and ageless again. Lamb’s music is really powerful and dynamic, but the problem I found is that first and foremost I’m a songwriter and when it comes down it for a songwriter, the greatest joy is to be able to take your songs and perform it really simply with a guitar and know that it works.”

One Good Thing is out now through Motion Audio/Inertia

Visit: lourhodes.com

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, April 10, 2010.

WHAT Vanessa Van Houten: Taboo
WHERE C3 Contemporary Art Space, Abbotsford Convent, 1 St Heliers Street, Abbotsford, 9415 3600, abbotsfordconvent.com.au

There’s an intimacy to Vanessa Van Houten’s performative photographic works that complicates, and ultimately, transcends simple gender politics. Shot around her grandfather’s home in Bavaria, Germany, the series of photographs sees Van Houten executing various household tasks and chores at the apparent insistence of her grandfather. She mows the lawns, trims the roses, cleans the fetid outdoor pool; her grandfather leans on his walking stick at the edge of the frame, pointing, as if to say ‘You missed a spot’. While it’s hard not to get swept up in the procession of slightly disturbing patriarchal intonations, Van Houten summons another whole layer of potential narratives here. Indeed, though there are clear echoes of problematic family structure, there’s also a sense of willingness, want and emotional co-dependence between the work’s two chief protagonists. One of the most moving photographs sees Van Houten read to her grandfather while he lies in bed. It is a moment not just of inverted power structure, but one of genuine personal and familial intimacy and rapport. Runs alongside Bernadette Keys’ wonderful ode to femininity Vital Statistics. Wed to Sun 10am–5pm, until April 18.

WHAT Gosia Wlodarczak: Self-Centred
WHERE Arc One Gallery, 45 Flinders Land, city, 9650 6710, arc1gallery.com

Flashes of familiarity and figuration emerge from the dense, intricate noise and scrawl of Gosia Wlodarczak’s Self-Centred, a series of pigment marker and acrylic works showing concurrently with Adam Hill’s politically charged paintings at Arc One. Patterns and motifs rise from the thicket of markings, scratches and lines; what at first appears abstract neutralises into recognisable shape and form. It’s a fascinating metamorphosis. What is perhaps most striking about the works is their apparent energy, their kinetic sense of gesture and motion. These worlds are alive and electric. Nothing is stagnant or still. One way of considering Wlodarczak’s work could be that of pure, automated recording. Far less contrived or structured than a diary or journal, this is observation, thought and memory in action. We are given not just a face or a hand, but the lines and traces of movement, sound and story and that ricochet betwixt and between. Tues to Sat 11am–5pm, until May 1.

WHAT Jesse Marlow: Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them
WHERE Menzies Art Brands, 1 Darling Street, South Yarra, 9832 8700, menziesartbrands.com

There are plenty of documentary photographers working in a similar vein to Melbourne street photographer Jesse Marlow, but very few who pull it off so naturally and convincingly. In its last day, Marlow’s Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them comprises a striking, at times humorous and ultimately absorbing collection of unstaged street-side photographs. Refreshingly, Marlow’s interest isn’t so much in the colourful human subject, but more the play of unlikely visual cues, signifiers and occurrences on the street and landscape. A crumpled cardboard box casts a shadow that resembles a smiling face; a vivid, red apple floats in a murky puddle bordered by a bright yellow road marking; a white swan perches beside a swan-shaped sign on the edge of a lake, as if posing ironically for the photograph. It’s brilliant. The notion of romancing the banal may be something of cliché in contemporary photography, but Marlow never goes so far. Whether unusual, improbable, beautiful or evocative, this is just visual happenstance. It just occurred to Marlow to open the shutter. 10am–5pm, last day today.

WHAT Omega
WHERE VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, 40 Dodds Street, Southbank, 9685 9400, vcam.unimelb.edu.au

Curated by Tony Garifalakis – whose current solo exhibition at Uplands Gallery was covered in Around the galleries last week – the title of this international group show seems no mistake. Featuring French artists Alain Declercq and Jeanne Susplugas, Mexico’s Joaquin Segura, Dutch artist Ewoud Van Rijn and Garifalakis, Omega feistily broaches contemporary themes of the end. International militarism, governmental conspiracy theories, consumerism, medication and therapy culture each take their place in the drawings, videos, sculptures and installations that stretch across Margaret Lawrence Gallery. Garifalakis’s Jane Fonda features a row of 12 large bullets engraved with the words “NO PAIN NO GAIN”; Segura’s Untitled sees a white, taxidermy dove frozen in flight, the ring of a grenade in its beak. Tues to Sat noon-5pm, until April 24. 

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RICHARD CHARTIER - ‘A FIELD FOR MIXING’
Published: The Age, A2, 48 Hours, April 10, 2010.

Richard Chartier
A Field for Mixing
(Room40/Vitamin)

Richard Chartier’s practice rests not in music but in the charting of urban sonic space. Using high-definition microphones and various effects, the American sound artist records, layers and subtly treats aural data that otherwise rests on the precipice of perception. Indeed, Chartier’s unusual art could be considered in terms of the sound of silence – minimalist and reductionist to a point where we are engaging wholly with the acoustic qualities and peripheries of specific architecture and space. While it requires a patient, headphone-only listen, new work A Field for Mixing is an incredibly engaging and realised document, given half a chance. Recorded in Australia, Japan and the US, the 50-minute piece gradually draws you deeper into its layers of texture and tone, with Chartier slowly adding and withdrawing fields of sound. The details of the various environments become increasingly striking the further the record plays out, immersing and consuming lovely anecdotal moments – distant voices, traffic and birdsong – before allowing them back up for air.

DAN RULE 

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INTERVIEW - SALLY SELTMANN
Published: The Vine, April 9, 2010.

Having dropped two wonderfully fragile home-recorded albums under the New Buffalo moniker– the stunningly wonky sample-craft of 2004’s The Last Beautiful Day and the elegiac, lo-fi piano renderings of 2007’s Somewhere, Anywhere – Sally Seltmann has turned the tables with a collection of confident record of maximal, melodic pop songs released under her own name.  

Recorded with Francois Tetaz and a host of Melbourne’s finest – think Mark Monnone of The Lucksmiths, Jessica Vebables, Cameron Bird and Gus Franklin of Architecture in Helsinki, Ned Collette, Jens Lekman and her husband Darren Seltmann (of Avalanches fame), Heart That’s Pounding is nothing short of a reinvention.

We spoke to the ever-affable Seltmann about the new record, finding confidence in herself and breaking away from her nom-de-plume.

So you’re back up in Sydney now?

Yeah, I’ve moved back up there around Christmas.

Is it a very different life being back in the homeland?

Yeah, it’s different, but we feel really happy up here. So yeah, it’s great.

I love the new record.

Thanks!

I don’t know if confidence is the word for it, because I thought the last record sounded confident, but perhaps this is just more joyous and realised or something. I don’t know if you feel that way about it?

Um, yeah, yeah, I feel like I wanted it to be a kind of uplifting pop record and I feel like it’s way more direct and way more pop (laughs).

Sure. At the same time though – and I think why it works – is that while it’s really quite maximal. It still retains that real intimacy that your older work possesses. Vocally, it still kind of feels like you’re right there in the room…

Yeah, because I produced this album with Francois Tetaz and we talked about that being my thing in a way – that intimate vocal sound – and that’s what people tend to respond to, especially when I play live. So we knew that we wanted it to still have that. I mean, with my last two albums I’ve just made them by myself in home studios, and we still wanted it to have that feel, but to be much more kind of slicker in the way it was put together.

Speaking of which – especially with recording the last album down in your shed at Torquay – I remember you talking about this necessity of really isolating yourself and getting inside your own world when you record. Has that changed for you, especially in the context of becoming a mum?

Yeah, it was a bit of a different process, mainly because I was working with Franc, which meant that I didn’t kind of spiral down into ‘Sally’s imagination land’ and not talk to people for a long time and feel really weird (laughs). Franc was constantly kind of pushing me to think things through more and things like that. But I still felt that, whenever we’d get together to work, I was really able to focus and get into the zone.

But it is really different. Before, I’d just be able to sit by myself for eight hours and just be working away and working away, but now because I’ve got a baby it’s about thinking how to maximise your time. You can’t just sit there fiddling around for ages (laughs).

Otherwise you’ll hear that little crying voice again and know you’ve missed your hour and a half window of opportunity.

Exactly!

Was the decision to record with Franc part of a conscious decision to break away from your old methodology? The home-recording thing?

Yeah, because Franc mixed my first two records I know him really well. And I knew that I really liked working with him and liked everything he brought to my music. And I did feel that with this album I wanted to break away from that whole, home-studio, self-produced thing. I didn’t really think about asking anyone else except Franc, and then he said yes and it just seemed to – straight from the start – work really well.

The decision to step away from the home-studio context seems to mirror your choice to release this under your own name instead of New Buffalo. Was it kind of a case of that New Buffalo alter ego running its course?

Yeah, well actually, my label in America were the ones who suggested the name change. Like, how would I feel about being just Sally Seltmann now. I had thought about it a bit in the past and I had found it really quite frustrating having to always kind of explain New Buffalo to people. But that said, I did intentionally call myself New Buffalo because I never really wanted to stand out in a crowd, and so that hopefully, people wouldn’t really know who I was (laughter). Which is quite stupid really.

But when Arts & Crafts made the suggestion, I thought that yeah, I definitely wanted to be Sally Seltmann now, just because it was easier and I felt more confident. And also with this album a lot of the things that I sing about, are about change and feeling as though I’m changing and trying to sort of overcome the shy person I have been.

Was that at the start or the end of the process? Like, did you enter the studio with the idea that this was going to be a Sally Seltmann record?

It happened towards the end. I always find with an album that I kind of delve into it and I sort of have strong ideas about what I want to do, but it’s not really until near the end that you can really see the body of work you’ve created and start to understand it all. Like ‘Oh, that’s why I wrote that song’. Everything begins to link up and you start to get a picture of where your life is at.

What about all the guests on the record, many of whom are your friends? Was it a plan to have so many people on there, or did you just kind of draw on them as you went along?

I knew that I wanted there to be some male vocals on the album, so we’d work on a song and then I’d think ‘Oh, it could be nice to have this person sing on the song’ or whatever. And I knew I wanted to have Jessica (Venables) sing harmonies and things throughout the album, because she’s played live with me and I really love working with her. But then there were other bands that I just liked. Like, I really love The Middle East and I had that song ‘Five Stars’ and I thought it would be really beautiful to have a group of singers coming in at the end. So I asked the band and they were really keen to do it and that was great.

What about Mark Monnone’s “unconventional percussion” on ‘Dream About Changing’? There’s a mention of that on the press release. I was talking to him when you were making the record and I didn’t hear anything about percussion.

It’s Mark slapping his bum (much laughter). For a while we were referring to that track as ‘Mark’s bum-slapping song’.

That’s such a Mark thing to do as well…

(Laughter) Yeah, I know!

That song is really beautiful though, and far more complex than it appears at first. You feel like you know what you’re going to get, but the chorus and the bridge expand it and take it to another place.

Oh, thanks! I actually kind of reworked that song quite a bit. It wasn’t one of those songs that just comes out really easily.

Lyrically, the record seems to have a kind of surety of self or something. You’re not singing that everything’s great and that you’re happy every second of the day, but it seems that you’re far more accepting of your own quirks and shyness and flaws. Whereas in the past I felt that your lyrics captured more of a confusion about life and yourself…

Yeah, that is really spot-on. I can tell you a story about ‘Heart That’s Pounding’, the song. I occasionally write lyrics where I’ll just go ‘Oh, that’s far too embarrassing, I can’t sing that’ and I just take that as proof that I should definitely sing it. Because I think it’s so much better not to have this self-conscious thing going on as a songwriter or writer of any kind, and I always respond really well to when other writers are like that. So I was thinking that that song was just this love song that was about being so desperately in love. Then I Googled ‘heart that’s pounding’ and it came up with all these anxiety websites (laughs). So that really resonated with the song and it definitely became a lot more complicated than it first seemed.

More like a heart that’s palpitating…

Yeah!

The record – and I think this is true of all your work to an extent – is feminine to the point of almost being old-fashioned, but proudly so. Would you agree with that?

Yeah. I feel like that, with this record especially, I’ve tried to write songs that are very pro-feminine. Like, I try to put the message out there that you can be a very strong woman and still be very feminine at the same time. I kind of hate how women try to be men, just because I think that being feminine is wonderful and you should celebrate it.

Do you feel that becoming a mum has really changed the way you think about yourself and your art?

Yes and no. One thing I’ve noticed since having a baby is that, for example, when you’re in a dark house at night you’re the one who has to be the tough guy. If you hear a noise and you think it’s a burglar and you get scared, you’re still the one who has to be like ‘It’s okay, we’re going to be okay’. Whereas I was used to being the scared one who would need someone else to be the big, strong one.

So in a way, I kind of feel like I’ve got this new strength because I’m caring for someone and playing the reassuring role. So it has definitely changed me in that way, but then at the same time I think that, ultimately, I do have the very similar thoughts to before I had a baby. I’m still the same person, but I’ve just experienced something that I’ve always wanted to experience and has changed my life, and I guess maybe some of the songs on the album reflect that.

Dan Rule

Heart That’s Pounding is out now through Shock.

sallyseltmann.com

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, April 2-3, 2010. 

WHAT David van Royen: Not Moving
WHERE Centre for Contemporary Photography, 404 George Street, Fitzroy, 9417 1549, ccp.org.au

Showing alongside a fascinating suite of exhibitions at CCP – including Justine Khamara’s brilliant Erysichthon’s Ball and the Autumn Masterpieces collection – David van Royen’s photographs espouse not just an eschewal of form, but a digression of self. The large-scale self-portraits that comprise Not Moving re-imagine the vantage of the self-portrait and explore the tension between one’s self-perception or image and the realities of physical appearance. Each of the images feature van Royen, his face averted or obscured by his mop of blond hair, the camera’s release cable in full view. With the photographer/subject concealed, we’re led to examine his clothing, his surroundings, his choice of backdrop and composition. We see protagonist in baggy jeans and black trainers beneath a graffiti-scarred underpass; on a children’s bicycle; in the embrace of an elderly woman; in bed with another man. In his artist’s statement, van Royen asserts that our self-image or “inner picture” remains the same throughout our lives, despite the changes that come with age and time. By removing his face from view, he subverts this self-perception. Both the artist and the viewer are left to ponder a different kind of evidence of self – that of situation and place. The image of van Royen himself is a virtual blank slate. Wed to Sat 11am-6pm, Sun 1pm–5pm, until May 16.

WHAT Tony Garifalakis: Bad Scene
WHERE Uplands Gallery, 247 High Street, Prahran, 9510 2374, uplandsgallery.com.au

There’s a resonance of activism to Tony Garifalakis’s defaced pop cultural images. Flooding stylised magazine portraits and airbrushed movie posters in swathes of glistening, black spray paint, his images leave only mouths, eyeballs or disembodied hairdos uncovered. On their own, the remaining anatomical bits and bobs become ghoulish, physically abstract and playfully obscene – retouched and airbrushed skin smothered in garish, lurid black. The works seem both a riposte and cry for help. While an obvious reading would be that of the celebration of pop-cultural sedition, Garifalakis also seems to broach more sinister notions of censorship and state control. By blacking-out the commercial images of contemporary capitalist society, he seems to allude to the same society’s “brand-building”; the state practice of editing or deleting evidence contrary to its own, self-defined identity. Tues to Fri 11am–5pm, Sat noon–4pm, until April 17.

WHAT Prue Crome: Land Light Project #1 / after the burn
WHERE West Space, Level 1, 15–19 Anthony Street, city, 9328 8712, westspace.org.au

The first, transportive instalment of Prue Crome’s Land Light Project takes us within the fire-ravaged wilderness of Arthur’s Creek. Using a trio projectors – creating a seamless forest vista on three of the gallery walls – and a soundtrack of field recordings, Crome charts the forest’s rejuvenation in the year since the Black Saturday fires. What begins as a silent, post-apocalyptic landscape gradually comes to life. Splinters of green sprout from the ashen bush floor, only to flourish into dense foliage; echoes of rustling leaves and birdsong consume the once dead quiet. It’s enlivening. What makes Crome’s work – which is interested in the shifting refraction of light on landscape – so appealing is the fact that it transcends the calamitous “before and after” narrative of so much bushfire documentation. Instead, Crome immerses us in the destruction, only to witness, month by month, the beautiful activation and regeneration of nature. Wed to Fri noon–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until April 10.

WHAT Jessica Hische: Drop Caps & Other Type Works
WHERE Lamington Drive, 89 George Street, Fitzroy, 8060 9745, lamingtondrive.com

Brooklyn illustrator and typographer Jessica Hische’s beauteous drop caps have been making their way into the text of many a blog over the last six months. Since starting her [start italic]Daily Drop Cap[end italic] project, in which she illustrates one new, alphabetically ordered drop cap per day and shares it via her blog, she’s become something of cult figure in typography and design circles. This compact exhibition brings together a remarkable array of individual drop cap letters and various alphabet prints (including one particularly stunning “vine alphabet”). What makes her typography so charming is its sheer whimsy. While beautifully balanced and designed, her letters avoid design-centrism. They’re open and evocative – the perfect starting point for any story. Wed to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until April 10.

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M-PHAZES - ‘GOOD GRACIOUS’
Published: The Vine, April 1, 2010. 

M-Phazes
Good Gracious
(Obese)

There are a couple of diverging conversations on the post Hilltop Hoods, Oz hip-hop landscape. One line of thought reads that maybe it’s time to banish the term “Australian hip-hop” altogether, that the possibility of domestic product transcending borders in a commercial sense necessitates a loosening of its staunch identity; a set of signifiers that the community’s senior players worked so hard and so long to establish.

The other school of thought – and the more popular one, it seems – is a little more pragmatic. Or, one might suggest, defeatist. It reads that the commercial success of acts like the Hoods, Bliss N Eso, The Herd and others evidences one thing: that the Oz hip-hop signature has found a lucrative market (in relative terms) on home turf. Why look outside?

This little conundrum lies at the heart of Good Gracious, the hugely anticipated debut from M-Phazes. In a relatively short though immensely prolific career, Melbourne via Gold Coast producer has forged a reputation as Australia’s beat-maker par excellence, dropping floor-shaking joints for a host of Australian and international MCs – from Bliss N Eso and Drapht, to Pharoahe Monch, Amerie, Kenn Starr, CL Smooth and Skyzoo – as well as turning some serious heads in the finals of the 2008 One Stop Shop beat battle in the US.

Put simply, M-Phazes is an Australian producer who has already garnered significant international reach. If anyone was primed to drop a record that could break through the US divide, it might just have be him. And from its first couple of joints – the soulful, brass stabbed groove of ‘For What it’s Worth’, blessed by impeccably smooth flow of Horrorshow’s MC Solo, and the huge, gritty boom-bap of ‘Where’s Elvis’, with Perth oddity Drapht on the mic – Good Gracious ticks all the boxes in the quality stakes. M-Phazes’ production is superb here, weaving intricate hooks, samples and instrumental details into maximal, colossally scaled kicks and stinging, snapping snares.

MC of the moment, Mantra, spits rapid-fire verses all over ‘The Freak Show’ while veteran master-rapper Delta explodes over the earth-shattering ‘Home’. Obese kingpin Pegz’s soul-drenched ‘Blind Man’ and the classic blaxploitation funk of Dialectrix’s ‘The Facilitator’ are further highlights.

But herein lies the issue with Good Gracious. Every single one of its 15 tracks features an Australian MC (or in the case of Nine High, a trio of Australian-based UK MCs), and while the aforementioned few tear it to pieces, others let the team down in a big way. That bastard child of Australian rap, Pez, sounds like a 14-year-old on his first sixpack and espouses everything that is ugly about the Australian attitude on the prodigiously terrible ‘The Club Song’, while Phrase’s foray into auto-tuned electro pop on ‘Music Box’ is resolutely awkward.

But a couple of weak tracks aren’t really the problem here. Good Gracious is an incredibly well balanced record and one that exemplifies M-Phazes’ deft ability to craft not just a kicking beat, but a full-length album of them. The crux is that, with so many Australian MCs and such a lack of instrumental tracks or international guests, it feels as though there’s nowhere else for this release to go. It’s an great record, but Good Gracious is nailed to a distinct time and a place.

Who knows why it happened this way. It might have been the whim of Pegz and co. at Obese, or perhaps even M-Phazes himself. But in the context of the sheer quality of his beats and the scope of his US admirers, you can’t help but feel that M-Phazes could have made an international statement with this debut.

Good Gracious didn’t have to be a great Australian hip-hop record; it could have been a great hip-hop record, that happened to be from Australia. There’s no disrespect in looking beyond your own backyard.

Dan Rule

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GEORGIA ANNE MULDROW - ‘KING’S BALLAD’
Published: The Big Issue #351, March/April 2010. 

King’s Ballad
Georgia Anne Muldrow
****

Georgia Anne Muldrow is a prodigy of contemporary black music. Since announcing herself via the shuffling, wonky grooves and free-jazz vocal explorations of 2006 neo-soul epic Olesi: Fragments of an Earth, the 26-year-old Los Angeles vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and producer has established a reputation as one of contemporary soul, RnB and hip-hop’s most prolific and idiosyncratic protagonists.

Her fifth solo record might just be her most realised. Kings Ballad sees Muldrow expand her typically fragmented and fleeting funk grooves into fully formed, modern soul compositions.

There are countless highlights, from the stunning percussive intricacies and swooning, interlocked harmonies of ‘Simple Life’ to the shimmering keys and modular bass groove of title track and Michael Jackson eulogy ‘King’s Ballad’.

But while such tracks prove an exciting development, it’s still Muldrow’s forays into more gestural, hip-hop and funk hooks that really shine here. The cosmic, synth-washed rap tropes of ‘Thrones’, the sticky funk romance of ‘Summer Love’ and soaring, piano-scored centre-piece ‘To the Stage’ (both featuring husband and funk poet Dudley Perkins) are some of Muldrow’s most engaging statements yet.

While her voice has always been her showpiece, King’s Ballad establishes Muldrow as an urban composer and producer par excellence.

Dan Rule 

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, March 27, 2010. 

WHAT Sangeeta Sandrasegar: Its feet were tied, with a silken thread of my own hands weaving
WHERE Murray White Room, Sargood Lane (off Exhibition Street, between Flinders Street and Flinders Lane), city, 9663 3204, murraywhiteroom.com

The initial appearance of Sangeeta Sandrasegar’s wondrously light, weightless nylon organza works (pictured, cropped, above) belies their entrenchment in place. Though suspended, flag-like, in the towering Murray White Room space, their resonance is in their connection to the very soil beneath our feet. And it is feet, ornately stitched with cotton thread and beading, that Sandrasegar – who recently returned to Melbourne after a half-decade stint abroad – uses as one of her central motifs. Each organza panel shimmers with a different, washed-out hue, the ghostly silhouette of what we can only assume are the artist’s legs occupying the focal point of the otherwise sheer textile. From her feet grow blooms of native flowers and foliage, climbing and entwining her ankles and shins, binding her to ground beneath. Rendered in thread and glass beading, the flora is the only sure fastening in an otherwise untethered, shadowlike image. In other works, Australian trees (a Ghost Gum, Coolabah and Wait-a-While cane vine) give some sense of solidity to the translucence, but still, their image seems somehow ephemeral. Sandrasegar’s work seems to gesture toward one of modern life’s confounding dualities. In an age of global mobility and communication, our connection to locale is still profound. Even in a different hemisphere, our homeland trails us like a shadow. Tues to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat noon–4pm, until April 17.

WHAT Madeline Kidd: Cruise Collection
WHERE The Narrows, Level 2, 141 Flinders Lane, city, 9654 1534, thenarrows.org

Madeline Kidd’s uber-sensory world of luxurious backdrops, 80s glamour signifiers and synthetic opulence is a treat to the eye and the taste bud. No expense is spared in these vibrant oil paintings. Indeed, the material is king here – the stiletto, the pearls, the cocktails – what can be bought, possessed, eaten, worn and discarded for another brighter, shinier, sweeter round. A string of pearls splays across a bunch of grapes in one painting; white-gloved hands tweak individual pearls and grapes at whim. Elsewhere, a swimming pool shimmers against the sun, a pair of champagne glasses and a bottle of bubbly perched at the ready. What is so charming about Kidd’s work is that if, indeed, there is a moral dimension, it is covert. Cruise Collection seems to celebrate as much as poke fun at the aesthetics of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. It is obligation-free titillation. Pleasure unlimited. Wed to Fri noon–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until April 9.

WHAT NEW 010
WHERE Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank, 9697 9999, accaonline.org.au

The highlights of the latest instalment of ACCA’s annual NEW exhibition series, which produced in sees the gallery recast into several discreet sub-spaces (courtesy of architecture and design studio NEXUS), emphasise gravity as a key means to their outcome. Set in a claustrophobic, crimson, linoleum-floored room, Lou Hubbard’s Dead Still sees a life-size silicon and rubber-styrene horse lying on its side mid-gallop, squished near-flat beneath three huge, 12mm-thick glass discs. Alicia Frankovich’s Medea, meanwhile, sees her transmute a living fruit and vegetable garden into a spectacular, inverted monument, its plants and bushes growing towards the ground, suspended by a rig mounted to the ceiling. In the next space – a room levitating nearly a metre from the floor – Susan Jacobs’ three tiny magnetic installations make minute metal objects literally float in thin air. Tues to Fri 10am–5pm, Sat to Sun 11am–6pm, until May 23.

WHAT Carolyn Eskdale: untitled after room
WHERE Sarah Scout, Level 1, 1A Crossley Street, city, 9654 4429, sarahscoutpresents.com

There’s a fascinating spatial and temporal resonance to Carolyn Eskdale’s hand-drawn photographic prints. In untitled after room she re-imagines the Sarah Scout space, though in reverse. Featuring cropped images of the gallery space prior to renovation and painting, her photographs effectively un-layer their very setting. The square, white room that is Sarah Scout becomes just a veneer atop walls with a life and a history. What makes these matte photographic prints especially interesting, though, is Eskdale’s hand-drawn extensions, which hover web-like among the scarred and scuffed, pre-white walls captured in the photographs. Eskdale’s works loosen and defy the permanence their subject and their surroundings. They encourage to conjure what has been and what might be. Thurs to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until April 3.

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LETTER  FROM LOS ANGELES - BIG NOWHERE
Published: The Age, A2, March 20, 2010. 

Dan Rule takes a walk on the city’s less glamorous side.

It’s almost respite, but the mere concept of reprieve seems ridiculous here. It is dark in here, our Buds warm. To the left of the bar, the “smoking room” – a filthy, fluorescent-lit, perspex cube – glows a very off white against the competing flicker of beer company neons. There are two men in there, and their smoke. They stare out. Our eyes drop. A pair of placards, positioned on the cube’s outer and inner walls, spell out the policy. Smoking, only. 

…

On 5th and Los Angeles, we’re two streets deep into Skid Row, downtown. We’re taking my friend Toby Burke’s “real LA” tour and these are real streets. We wander from the historical Angels Flight Railway on Bunker Hill – where late author John Fante once lived – through the mad tangle of bodies and grand, decaying buildings of South Broadway, and down, down into Skid Row. The flophouses, the drug afflicted, the maimed, the prostituted. A man with a blaring sound-system strapped to shopping cart walks past, running a hand along my wife’s behind. We walk on. No words are spoken

… 

It’s 2pm and the bar is full. Men. Late middle age, older, though it’s hard to tell. Professionals, as Toby puts it. King Eddy’s is a professionals’ bar. Full-timers. It is where Charles Bukowski drank during his dark years, and now us. Three Australians, sitting against the wall. It’s safer that way.

…

You can see downtown from Toby’s home-studio in Silverlake. The smog-lined cityscape, a foreground of palm trees and rooftops and powerlines and intermittent foliage. A Melbourne boy, he’s been in LA on and off for the last decade, writing songs and stories and releasing records with his band Horse Stories. His wife, Jessica, is from San Diego and works for a major movie studio. They both know the showbiz side of this city too well. The networking, the fake tans, the business; the kind of fame-desperation that leads our waiter, one night, to somehow weave the assertion that he “worked on Survivor” into his description of the wine list.

 …

Since 2007, Richard Schave’s company Esotouric have run increasingly popular bus tours of Raymond Chandler, John Fante and Charles Bukowski’s former homes and haunts in downtown LA and East Hollywood. He says the tours came from a need to “explain Los Angeles”. Deep in the heart of South Central, meanwhile, $65 and liability waiver puts you inline for one of former gang member and community worker Alfred Lomas’s LA Gang Tours, a 12-stop, two-hour bus ride through Los Angeles high-profile gang areas, including discussions with current gang-members. Critics have branded the venture voyeuristic and dehumanising. Lomas, who brokered a cease-fire for the tour-path, frames his operation in terms of insight and understanding. Profits are channelled back into community education, training and employment programs. Since debuting in late November, each of LA Gang Tours’ six outings has sold out.

…

We sit against our wall, eyes lowered. But it’s only a matter of time in a place like this. He’s an old Mexican fellow, eyes rolling, inebriated and friendly as you like. There are pleasantries, the shaking of hands (especially my wife’s). He speaks neither Spanish nor English. This late in the day, he has a dialect of his own. We chat on, nonsensically, regardless. There is some mention of the children’s hospital, of tarantulas, but that’s all we catch. We’ve been caught, nonetheless, by another. You can never hide an accent. A large, imposing man in stained chinos spins around, wildly throws his arms in the air. I flinch. A grin broadens on his face. “Aussies in the house!” he bellows at the top of his voice.

…

It’s easy to lose your brain in LA. That’s how Toby puts it, anyway. The vacuousness of Beverley Hills, the sleaze of the Valley, the money, the business; beneath it all there’s a gritty, sometimes scary metropolis with a history and stories and people. He too feels he has to “explain” LA – to friends, to family, to new acquaintances. It’s a city that he has grown to love.

…

When we left New York three days ago, it was minus 10 degrees. Wandering back west on 5th, the afternoon has a warm winter glow and we wear t-shirts. There are still wild eyes on South Main, still decrepit shopping carts filled with every meagre possession, still the odd scream or holler. But if you look and listen hard enough, there’s the odd smile and occasional tattle of laughter. There’s giggling about King Eddy’s and there’s talk of cheap tacos at a Mexican market on Broadway. We walk on through LA’s discarded blocks, not a fake tan or boob-job or networking opportunity in sight. It really is a lovely afternoon.

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