UTOPIAN SLUMPS - UNEARTHING ART’S NEW UTOPIA
Published: Broadsheet Winter Print Edition, June/July 2010.

Infamous gallery space Utopian Slumps has a new CBD address and a revised carter. We spoke to founder and director Melissa Loughnan about the gallery’s coming of age. By Dan Rule.

Melissa Loughnan was resolute, if only in relation to a few key criteria. When she reopened Utopian Slumps at its new premises, there were to be no rats, no leaks and a safe, secure stockroom. Oh, and pole dancing classes downstairs? They were definitely out.

“Looking back, it really was quite hilarious,” she says smilingly of Utopian’s original, somewhat charmingly grotty setting, jammed between two warehouses in Easey Street, Collingwood. “In the evenings I’d be installing shows and the pole dancers would be having classes downstairs, playing the same Britney Spears song over and over again, learning their routines.”

“During the day, my neighbours would be playing really loud Australian hip-hop and there’d be weed smells and aerosol smells wafting around.”

A sigh, a laugh. “So as you can imagine, it wasn’t the kind of place that you could work in as a gallerist long term.”

We’re sipping tea in the stockroom and office of Utopian Slumps’ brand new incarnation, on the ground floor of handsome little red brick building midway down Guildford Lane, in an unusually peaceful little pocket of the CBD. A patchwork or artworks line one wall; installation works occupy spare space; the debris and clutter and evidence of her recent move punctuate the otherwise open floor plan. An exhibition by PAM designer and artist Misha Hollenbach fills the adjoining gallery space with arcane collages, sculptures and found images.

It’s a hive of activity, one that the 28-year-old curator and now commercial gallerist can envision taking the Utopian Slumps brand – which was established over three dynamic, widely celebrated, cult-like years at Collingwood – to a new plateau.

“Moving into the city was just like ‘Okay, I’m becoming an actual business now’,” she says. “I guess it’s just about growing up. The first Utopian Slumps was my friendly, quiet rebellion. This is the next stage of my maturation.”

That’s not to underestimate the original Slumps’ achievements. Following its inaugural show by renowned Melbourne collective DAMP in February 2007, the space’s stint in Collingwood saw it host some of Australia’s most dynamic emerging artists and help stimulate new discourses on craft aesthetics, anti-art and some of the more innovative investigations into installation practice.

Indeed, during its short time on the scene, the then not-for-profit enterprise effectively reinvigorated a whole range of marginalised art practice, the folk-art and craft-inspired installations of Dylan Martorell and Nathan Gray, immersive sculptural and installations works of Dan Moynihan and Susan Jacobs, and multi-disciplinary explorations of Elvis Richardson and Charlie Sofo included.

Chatting with Loughnan – who has Master of Art Curatorship, a Post Graduate Diploma in Art History and a BA in Creative Arts, all from Melbourne University – it soon becomes apparent that it’s a quality she has been unwilling to part with. Her shift to a commercial setting has hardly dampened she and assistant curator Helen Hughes’ intent.

“I really feel as though the curatorial model has stayed the same,” she says simply. “It has just professionalised. It’s the same with the business model. It’s coming from the same place and I’m working with the same artists that I have in the past.”

“I don’t feel that I have to play the game,” she continues. “I’ll still be having occasional installation shows and that’s why I kept a stockroom, because I thought it was really important to release the gallery from the necessity of having to have a saleable show every month. Sometimes I just like doing things for the sake of it, and I’ve always said that my aesthetic is an ugly/beautiful aesthetic a craft-based, of-the-hand aesthetic. That hasn’t changed here.”

A glance at Loughnan’s nine-strong stable of represented artists seems to confirm her point. From the aforementioned Hollenbach, Martorell and Gray, to the divergent painting practices of Mark Rodda, Jake Walker, Amber Wallis and William McKinnon, pattern-based painting and sculptural works of Starlie Geikie and cryptic paintings and collages of Steven Asquith, the roster is of a distinctly Utopian ilk. 

“All the artists are coming from very different angles, but they’ve got something unifying them too,” says Loughnan. “I’ve always been interested in multi-disciplinary creativity as well. I really like that Nathan and Dylan always have sound accompanying their work and there’s always events running through their exhibitions; Starlie comes from a craft, but also very academic background; Misha comes from fashion and design.”

“Pretty much all the artists that I’m commercially representing have exhibited before in the Collingwood space. But their work is reflecting the shift too. Like, Misha had the Changes show at the old space in 2008, but his current show here is a little more slick and a little more grown up, because the space is a little more slick and a little more grown up.”

Finding the right real estate was crucial to striking a balance between maintaining the Utopian ethos and the operating successfully in a commercial gallery context. After much searching and a false start or two, the Guildford Lane premises emerged as a clear standout.  

“I made sure it was down a laneway,” says Loughnan. “There was a giant crack in the floor that I filled, but I don’t mind that you can see that I filled it. I’ve kept the peeling paint, there’s exposed brick, the bars on the windows are a bit shitty, but you know, that’s kind of perfect to me.”

“I feel like I’ve kept the vibe, but just grown up a bit and professionalised it. I’ve turned it into maybe a more uniform white cube, but I feel like we haven’t lost heart and soul of the origin.”

As such, Loughnan hopes to that the space can help alter the commercial artistic climate, if only a little. “I’ve wanted to kind of reject that sense of snobbery,” she says. “A lot of these artists, five years ago, would have just been deemed craft practitioners, not worthy of commercial representation or of collectors taking notice of them. But I think things are changing.”

And while the challenges and politics of breaking into Melbourne’s already established commercial art market are plenty, Loughnan seems to be making more friends than enemies. “The other day this guy from Belgium came in and it was like ‘How the hell did you find out about the space?’,” she laughs. “I haven’t advertised anywhere.”

“It ends up that he had a list of galleries that someone had given him, and when I read it I was so excited.”

“It was like: Anna Schwartz, Sarah Scout, Neon Parc, Block Projects, Tolarno, Utopian Slumps,” she pauses, flashes a smile. “I was just so flattered that in a really short period, we were on this ridiculous list of commercial galleries.” 

utopianslumps.com

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WINTER WARBLERS
Published: Broadsheet Winter Print Edition, June/July 2010.

As the cold begins to bite, we preview five touring acts that won’t give you the chills this winter. By Dan Rule.

Grizzly Bear
July 27, Palais Theatre
$67, ticketmaster.com.au

The line between in revision and straight revivalism can seem a fine one in the contemporary musical landscape. Not so, however, when you spend time with the sweeping melodic and textural scapes of Brooklyn coterie Grizzly Bear. Astutely referential yet painstakingly original, the quartet’s sound has morphed from the murky, narcotic atmospheres of 2004 debut Horn of Plenty and vast, experimental folk-rock of 2006’s Yellow House, to the widescreen psychedelia and vintage symphonic pop tropes of last year’s world-beating Veckatimest, recasting and reinventing about three decades worth of influences and references in the process. In a time in which pastiche so often passes for originality, Grizzly Bear are a group that summon and deconstruct pop’s past to forge their own way forward. Not to be missed.  

 Jonsi
August 4, Palace Theatre
$69, ticketek.com.au

When enigmatic Sigur Ros frontman Jonsi released his debut solo effort Go in April, you could have been forgiven for believing you were listening to a completely different artist. While his signature vocals were as weightless and delicate as ever, the storm of schizophrenic percussion (courtesy of Finnish drummer Samulia Kosminen) and ecstatic, colour-drenched arrangements (from Nico Muhly) couldn’t have been further removed from Sigur Ros’s slow moving, heavily tonal sound. With his group on indefinite hiatus, the Reykjavik songwriter is going through nothing short of a reinvention, and a joyous one at that. His band may be known for their glacial, cinematic aesthetic, but Jonsi’s show at the Palace will glow with radiant colour. 

Sally Seltmann
July 10, Corner Hotel
$20, cornerhotel.com

There’s very little not to like about Sally Seltmann. Known more widely by her once moniker New Buffalo, the Sydney songstress writes the kind of gorgeous, sweet-as-a-pea pop tunes that could melt even the coldest of hearts. But there are more strings to the young artist’s bow than sweetness and delight. The lo-fi pop vistas of New Buffalo debut The Last Beautiful Day (2004), the tender, elegiac piano balladry of follow-up Somewhere, Anywhere (2007) and self-assured pop-craft of her brand new record – and first under her own name – Heart That’s Pounding all point to a songwriter at the height of her intimate, evocative, highly emotive powers. It was no fluke that the song she penned for her friend and label-mate Leslie Feist, the flourishing 1234, became an international phenomenon. Featuring several of Melbourne’s finest indie musical sorts, this belated record launch at The Corner will warm the winter night. 

Yeasayer
July 29, Prince of Wales
$45, ticketek.com.au

While there’s a surplus of generic, archetypal indie outfits amid music’s current crop, there are also plenty of groups willing to bend, stretch and breach the genre’s formal, stylistic and geographic peripheries. Yeasayer – who infamously tagged themselves “ENYA with bounce” – is one such band. Another bunch of Brooklyn’s minions, the four-piece mine a swathe of cross-cultural, trans-genre flavours and inflections, crafting a melange of worldly intonation and electronically altered pop inflections. Their show at the Prince will prove one of winter’s weirdest and most wonderful. 

K-os
August 3, Prince of Wales
$35, ticketek.com.au

To describe Trinidad and Toronto-raised MC, vocalist, musician and producer K-os in terms of hip-hop would only tell a fraction of the story. The young Canadian artist’s work toes a thoroughly unconventional line between songwriterly smarts, bouncing southern rap and a near obsessive whim for shrewd pop-cultural reference. With his disparate new album Yes! in his rucksack, he makes his debut Melbourne performance at the Prince in what will enthral refined rap-heads, folkies and indie types alike. 

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BEATS with Dan Rule
Published: Music Australia Guide #77, June 2010.

Guilty Simpson
OJ Simpson
****1/2 

OJ Simpson is a world away from the street-schooled gangsta tropes of Guilty Simpson’s 2008 debut Ode to the Ghetto. Riddled with off-kilter skits, conversation fragments and general sonic obscura – courtesy of production professor Madlib – the hardline Detroit rapper gives himself the scope to explore his real range here. Indeed, OJ affords Guilty’s roughneck renderings real light, shade and vantage. We don’t just get the tough guy, but a sense of context, experience and place. Cali Hills, his elegy to fallen Detroit contemporary JDilla, makes for his most moving track to date. Even the most uncompromising gun-slingers harbour sadness, hopes, fears and vulnerabilities.

Stones Throw/Fuse 

Lorn
Nothing Else
****

Flying Lotus made a good call in appointing Lorn’s Nothing Else the inaugural album on his Brainfeeder imprint. The young Illinois producer merges grimy electronica, rippling sub-bass and surging orchestral dynamics on his strikingly succinct debut. Highlights abound. The militant drum rattle of Army of Fear and subterranean bass snarls of Automaton showcase Lorn’s penchant for heavy frequencies, while the melodic density and shimmering top end of Cherry Moon makes for a stunning moments of melancholia. Perhaps most impressive though is Lorn’s focus. His synthetic sonic palette may lack the colour of some producers, but he makes amends with a sheer, unshakable solidity. 

Brainfeeder/Inertia 

Nas & Damian Marley
Distant Relatives
***1/2 

Hip hop legend Nas and reggae heir Damian Marley’s ode to African lineage, Distant Relatives, promises a lot in its opening stanzas. The rollicking As We Enter has the duo trading barbs over a bouncing dancehall-cum-boom bap hook, Nas’s impeccably rugged flow ricocheting off Marley’s tumble of melodic couplets. It’s a flash of gritty electricity amid an at times overly produced record. But while Marley’s production does have a tendency to feel a little canned, there are some indisputably powerful moments here. Cuts like Friends, Land of Promise and the punchy Nah Mean show this unlikely duo to posses a genuine chemistry. 

DefJam/Universal 

Ozi Batla
Wild Colonial
****

Herd and Astronomy Class cat Ozi Batla would have to be one of Australia’s most underrated MCs. Spend time with his long-overdue solo oeuvre Wild Colonial and you’ll witness a cadence so fluent, so natural and tight that it seems ridiculous that he’s not more widely celebrated. Part political rumination, part personal reflection, part celebratory hip hop statement, Wild Colonial is one of the stronger domestic releases you’ll hear this year. Ozi brings it back to the roots her, spitting rolling verses over Sandro’s dark, dusty, vinyl-scored boom bap and DJ Bonez’ nimble cuts. It’s razor-sharp traversal of this master rap craftsman’s expansive range. 

Elefant Traks/Inertia

Dimlite
Prismic Tops
****

The likes of precocious LA kids Flying Lotus, Ras G and Nosaj Thing and Glasgow hoppers Hudson Mohawke and Rustie might be the names that come to mind when we think of the progressive instrumental hip hop mutations often referred to as a “wonky”, but the movement’s roots burrow much deeper. In fact, talk to any of today’s protagonists and they’ll point you squarely in the direction of one Mr Dimlite. His new mini-album Prismic Tops has the evidence of proto-wonk written all over it. The producer-vocalist’s melange of melted soul, static shrouds and skewed rhythmic reverie joins all the dots. An eye-opening release by a little-known iconoclast.

Now Again/Fuse 

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MIDNIGHT JUGGERNAUTS - MIDNIGHT SPINS ON THE AXIS
Published: Music Australia Guide #77, June 2010.

Spanning two years and countless settings, the making of Midnight Juggernauts’ The Crystal Axis was a genuine meeting of minds. MAG’s Dan Rule joins the forum. 

Despite the endless international tours, rapturous acclaim and their standing at the head of “indie-dance”, Midnight Juggernauts were never about to rest on their laurels.

Three years on from unleashing their genre-defining 2007 debut Dystopia on an unsuspecting international music community, the Melbourne trio have consciously and unapologetically changed their stripes.

“We’re not at all sure how people are going to take this record,” says drummer Daniel Stricker of divergent new record The Crystal Axis. “It might polarise some of our fans,” he pauses, pushing a stray lock from his face. “But I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.”

The sentiment speaks volumes about the band’s outlook. Chatting over a beer or two at Melbourne venue the East Brunswick Club, the trio are nothing if not creatively ambitious. Indeed, if there’s one theme that emerges when broaching The Crystal Axis, it’s that the band were unafraid to challenge both themselves and their listeners.   

“Whether people like it or not, I guess this new album established the fact that we’re a band who are going to make the records we want to make,” urges guitarist Andy Szekeres. “I know we all have this idea in our minds that we’d like to make lots of albums and really different albums over a number of years.”

Adds vocalist Vincent Vendetta: “It’s too easy to just keep doing these songs that rely on a four/four beat.”

In many ways, the group’s line of creative enquiry comes as little of a surprise. Despite having only graced the stage for half a decade, the trio have amassed a career’s worth of international touring experience, hype and hyperbole. Put simply, they’ve had to grow up fast.

Founded by old school friends Szekeres and Vendetta in 2004, Stricker joined then duo the following year, before they dropped a pair of EPs – 2005’s self-titled debut and 2006’s Secrets of the Universe – on Cut Copy’s in-house imprint Cutters. It wasn’t long before the trio’s star was on the rise with the tracks like the ripplingg, synth-washed groove of Shadows becoming an underground club hit. Remix work for the likes of The Presets, Dragonette and Detroit disco-garage sextet Electric Six followed and by the time they’d come to record brilliant 2007 debut album Dystopia, the group’s mash of brooding prog-infused cinematics, spacious Bowie-esque pop and raw, bass-driven dance music had seen them anointed the kings of a new, press-coined sub-genre dubbed “indie-dance”.

Released via their own label Siberia Records, the album saw them become take the Australian live scene by storm and by the time the trio re-released the record overseas in 2008, they were already fixtures of the international touring circuit. The played festival shows at Coachella, Fuji Rock, Glastonbury, Montreaux Jazz Festival and Big Day Out and earned plaudits from the likes of French electro kings Justice and Sebastian Tellier among others.

When they finally found themselves back on home shores in early 2009, Vendetta, Szekeres and Stricker were all but spent. “We toured Dystopia for such a long time that we just needed a break from each other,” says Stricker. “I think we felt a little dislocated.”

It wasn’t long until the creative fire returned. They loaded up the van with gear and decamped to an old holiday house on north coast of New South Wales, where they began to piece together the ideas for The Crystal Axis.

As Szekeres explains, playing live together for such a period time added a new dynamic to the sessions. “A lot of what ended up on the record it is just us in a room, jamming and playing things out, which really reflected the process,” he says. “The drums and guitars, they were all really long takes and not really edited down. So it was very much a performance in that sense, with more imperfections and kind of happy accidents.”

It’s a quality that permeates the finished record. Where Dystopia pulsed with dance floor energy, The Crystal Axis flourishes with loose, band dynamics and a vastly more organic pop timbre. While still brimming with electronic nuances and the band’s trademark synth-heavy sound, cuts like Lara Versus The Savage Pack and the swirling obscura of Virago veer so far as gritty, psych-drenched soul. For Midnight Juggernauts, the record’s diversity is a source of pride. 

“You kind of forget how once you release music it just spreads out there and takes on this life of its own and enters people’s lives,” says Vendetta. “You really want to make sure that you’re proud of what you put out there.”

“Like, we were online a while ago and realised this guy had tattooed the lyrics to one of our songs on his arm, so from that point on I kind of realised how seriously you have to take it,” he laughs

Indeed, for Midnight Juggernauts, The Crystal Axis represents more than just another record. Rather, it’s a meeting of the minds.

“There are songs that have origins in the south of France, origins in Japan and origins at this holiday house, but they’re all kind of filtered through the three of us to create the record,” says Vendetta.

“It was three people coming together and crystallise what our sound will be for the next however many years.”

The Crystal Axis is out via Siberia/Inertia

Visit: midnightjuggernauts.com

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THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS - ‘FURTHER’
Published: Music Australia Guide #77, June 2010. 

The Chemical Brothers
Further
****
(Freestyle Dust/EMI) 

The ‘00s was a decade of diminishing prolificacy and, many might suggest, quality for the pair once known as the UK’s premier electronic duo. Where the mid and late ‘90s saw Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands (aka The Chemical Brothers) release a record almost every year – classic debut Exit Planet Dust (1995) and electronic landmark Dig Your Own Hole (1997) included – the last 10 years has witnessed a comparatively meagre return three reasonable, but none too convincing records. The Chemical Brothers’ star, it seemed, was on the wane. Seventh studio album Further definitely arrests the slide. There’s plenty of vintage Chemical Brothers here. Colossal synth shards puncture the cosmic atmospheres of Escape Velocity, peaking into the record’s first, foot-to-the-floor dance rhythm, while Dissolve tears along in classic Chemical fashion, with ‘70s psyche guitar lines and rattling, gun-barrel drum breaks moulding a kind of loose, expanded take on rock. It’s electrifying (if hardly surprising) stuff. The real charms are in Rowlands’ and Simons’ gestures toward early house music and attention to melodic, textural and analogue production detail. Indeed, subtleties reward on this extended, eight-track record. The sweet pop overture of Another World is consumed in droning synth slabs and phases before modulating into a dense, blocky, house rhythm, while Swoon makes for a wondrous moment of disco-flecked euphoria. Though hardly a reinvention, what Further does so well is extend and sophisticate The Chemical Brothers’ sound. As it’s title suggests, this record broadens Simons’ and Rowlands’ scope.

DAN RULE

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, June 12, 2010. 

WHAT Chronox
WHERE Lamington Drive, 89 George Street, Fitzroy, 8060 9745, lamingtondrive.com

While there is a technical, mathematical fascination to Chronox – the collaborative installation project of Lachlan Conn and Michael Prior – its resonance is one of a far more esoteric, otherworldly character. In the darkened gallery space, a ceiling-mounted data projector intermittently illuminates a loose, grid-like arrangement of geometrical sculptures on the floor with gently pulsing, spinning light configurations that drift in and out of phase. Three turntables, set in the far corners of the space, play vinyl records pressed with locked, fragmentary sound loops, their undulating rhythms finding an unlikely synchronicity with the projections and one another. The magic lies herein. Even when we change tracks on each of the record players – lift the stylus and lower it to another loop – a new, slightly altered synchronicity forms amid the shuffling sounds and soft, purple light. No matter the combination of sonic and ocular rhythms, this glowing world in miniature evidences a new, interlocked cadence. It is as if we’ve entered the unwitnessed mechanisms of time itself; a world in parallel, unaffected by the rotation of the globe and passing of the seasons. Chronox is a virtuality that transcends the arbitrary ticking of a clock. It is a world that exists between the cracks. Wed to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until July 3.

WHAT David Jolly: Love Town
WHERE Sutton Gallery, 254 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, 9416 0727, suttongallery.com.au

There’s something oddly atmospheric about David Jolly’s deft oil and enamel paintings on glass, captured so beautifully in this new series of chronological landscapes, painted from the artist’s own photographs of an all-night music festival set amid dense bushland. There’s a kind of haze, a rare attention to variations of light and the ambience of landscape. Much of this is to do with Jolly’s uncanny painterly technique. Indeed, Love Town’s vistas are rendered from foreground to background on the reverse side of framed glass. It’s an incredibly direct and responsive technique; any sense of texture of surface is removed to reveal a vivid, flat, luminous image. But there’s also the sense that the Jolly is effectively dabbling in various mediums and vantages at once here. His paintings’ referents aren’t the actual landscapes themselves, but their photographic documentation. Indeed, Love Town engages not just with notions of memory and landscape, but with the characteristics and qualities of the analogue photographic medium. As if to illustrate the point, two of the 15 works capture the half-exposed end of his roll of film. This is place, memory and landscape – twice filtered. Tues to Sat 11am–5pm, until June 19.

WHAT Jill Orr: Vision
WHERE Jenny Port Gallery, Level 1, 7 Albert Street, Richmond, 9429 6006, jennyportgallery.com.au

Jill Orr’s large-scale, subtly performative portraits of children from Avoca Primary School forge a duality between the external and internal. Presented as diptychs, the monochromatic photographs capture each child with eyes open – staring directly, intently at the lens – and eyes closed. The effect is striking. They are at once inclusive and intensely private. We witness the façade, the public face, only to be left yearning for the personal, introspective details – the dreams and fears and troubles and contentment. In an interesting twist, each of the children’s faces is painted in white clay. One might think this would work as unifying mask. Far from it. By painting the surface of the skin, Orr draws attention to the minutiae, the surfaces and ‘landscapes’ distinct to each and every one of us. Wed to Sat 11am–5pm, until July 3.

WHAT Amelie Scalercio: Tiny Movements
WHERE C3 Contemporary Art Space, Abbotsford Convent, 1 St Heliers Street, Abbotsford, 9415 3600, abbotsfordconvent.com.au

The spectre of death lurks betwixt and between Amelie Scalercio’s petite, technically profound ballpoint pen-on-paper renderings. But the young Melbourne artist’s drawings are far from morbid. Rather, they embody an intriguing duality. Pairing spectacular volcanic eruptions with the names of celebrities who died of heart attacks – James Brown, John Candy, Roy Orbison, Bettie Page and Scalercio’s cat included – her works, on the one level, seem to muse on death as momentous media event. But in something of a psychedelically intonated twist, when we inspect these eruptions more closely, eyes, hair and ghostly facial features begin to emerge amid the morass of smoke and lava. It seems a reconnection with the individual, rather than the celebrity enigma. With or without media hyperbole and event, Scalercio’s work casts death as deeply personal and singular. 10am–5pm, last day tomorrow.

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SOUNDING THE SIRENS OF VENICE
Published: Broadsheet, June 10, 2010.

The sprawling, widescreen pop of Melbourne husband and wife team The Sirens of Venice’s debut record belies its humble beginnings. By Dan Rule.

The story of Camilla and Craig Jackson’s self-titled debut as The Sirens of Venice is one of happy contradictions. The record’s lush pop vistas and sweeping atmospheres rose from the most unassuming of domestic settings.

“I really don’t think we had any kind of vision,” says Camilla. “It was more that I’d just be writing songs on the guitar around the house and Craig would go, ‘Oh, that sounds good’ and then we’d work on it. All of a sudden, we had this batch of songs and we started doing demos.”

“I think it was more the fact that we were so broke at the time,” adds Craig, better known as the frontman of Melbourne stalwarts Gersey. “We couldn’t really afford to go out, so we had to entertain ourselves, and playing around with Garage Band was one of our only forms of entertainment,” he laughs.

With Camilla writing the initial melodies and chord progressions on guitar, Craig set about filling her songs out via Garage Band, adding vocals, textures and instrumental arrangements. “Before we knew it we had about fifty tracks on each song and it started sounding really big and lush,” says Camilla.

With songs in hand, they turned to Jed Palmer and and former Underground Lovers frontman Vince Giarrusso to produce the record. “They just really took it and ran with it and we were very happy to give them open slather on the whole thing,” explains Craig. “We were all on the same page and all running in the same direction. So it was frightening, but at the same time really rewarding.”

The resulting suite of richly hued pop vignettes speaks for itself. “The more we thought about what the sirens of Venice actually were – these sirens that warned of a rising sea – the more it seemed to relate to the kind of haunting, dark, beautiful thing we were trying to go for,” says Craig, before Camilla interjects, laughingly.

 “We soon realised that a name like Boogie Jungle just wasn’t going to work.” 

The Sirens of Venice is out via Speak n Spell/Inertia

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LIFE IN 32 BARS - THE PARADISE MOTEL
Published: Music Australia Guide #77, June 2010. 

Led by principal songwriter Charles Bickford, The Paradise Motel’s arcane, narcotic musical craft made them one of Australia’s most enigmatic and accomplished bands. After a decade-long hiatus, they release Australian Ghost Story, inspired by the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain. By Dan Rule.

1994 Friends Charles Bickford, Matt Bailey and Matt Aulich form The Paradise motel in Hobart, playing only the one gig before moving across Bass Strait to Melbourne. 

1995 The trio meet vocalist Merida Sussex, organist BJ Austin and drummer Tim O’Shannassy. The dynamic is golden, with Sussex’s hushed, elegiac vocal creating a perfect foil for the group’s shadowy instrumental scapes. They play their first Melbourne gig on Valentines Day at the defunct Carlton Movie House. 

1996 After signing to Mushroom Records, the band release debut EP Left Over Life to Kill to rapturous acclaim. Their narcotic mergence of gritty, claustrophobic atmospheres and elegant and time towering musical passages inspires some pundits to dub the record one of the finest ever Australian debuts. 

1997 Following an outtakes and remixes EP, which featured an abstract reinterpretation of The Triffids’ classic Raining Pleasure, the band release their debut album Still Life. It is one of the most anticipated and celebrated records of the year. 

1998 The Paradise Motel release dense, layered second album Flight Paths, as Mushroom groom them for the international market. 

1999–2000 After a swag of glowing reviews in UK music mags, the band make the shift to London, touring Europe with the likes of Grandaddy, Mercury Rev and Sparklehorse. Bickford, however, begins to feel his inspiration waning and the band decide to take an indefinite break. 

2000–2007 Aulich, Sussex and O’Shannassy remain in England where they each follow different paths. Aulich spend time in indie band Drugstore and Sussex releases a solo record before founding the group Candy and taking up ranks at the Stolen Records label. Bickford spends time between Melbourne and London, starting a family, writing songs and investing time in his second love, antiquities. 

2008 The band reunite, albeit remotely, to track the record I Still Hear Your Voice At Night, with Esme Macdonald on bass and Damien Hill on drums. Tragically, Hill dies near the end of the sessions and the record is shelved. 

2010 Following recording sessions deep in the bush at Warburton, two hours east of Melbourne, the band reunite with Andy Hazel on drums and Campbell Shaw on violin to release the stunning Australian Ghost Story. A haunting, emotive reflection on the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain, it is their first record for almost 12 years.

On the hiatus: “As young people growing up in Tasmania, we’d always been looking outwards. But when we got to the UK I realised that I was only interested in looking homeward again. It got to that point over there where, well, I really didn’t have anything to say and so the band stopped functioning.”

On The Motel: “Serious events and emotional events do have a tendency to stay alive in people minds, and The Motel was definitely one of them. No one talked about the end.” 

On Australian Ghost Story: “It was just one of those things that really echoed throughout our childhoods in Australia. It is a really emotive subject for someone who is interested in humanity and human responses. The record isn’t a straight narrative about the life and death of Azaria Chamberlain. It really is about the lives that were being lived in and around the event in 1980 and a the emotional response to that.” 

On maturity: “There’s that quote about when you’re a young band, you have your whole life to make your first record. Well it feels like we’ve had another 10 years to make our first record again and it’s a pretty magical thing. I feel like there’s a kind of delicate, poetic quality to the music not that wasn’t available to me as a man in my twenties.”

Australian Ghost Story is out on June 11 through Left Over Life to Kill/Inertia

Visit: the-paradise-motel.com

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THE ICON - PAUL WELLER
Published: Music Australia Guide #77, June 2010.

In The Icon we profile those who change music. This month, Dan Rule follows the ever-expanding creative vision of the man known as ‘The Modfather’, Paul Weller. 

He may have shot to stardom fronting the most popular band of the British punk era, The Jam, but Paul Weller’s creative journey has transcended singular notions of success, style or art. A driven, single-minded creator and true musical journeyman, Weller has expanded and reinvented his approach, palette and craft time and time again. His divergent work with The Style Council and later as a solo artist flew in the face of his previous commercial successes and his sheer individuality inspired a generation of British acts,‘90s Brit-pop gods Oasis and The Verve among others.

Born in 1958 to working class parents in Surrey, England, Weller’s first musical love was The Beatles, before exploring the grittier sounds of The Who and The Small Faces. He picked up the guitar in early high school and began jamming Beatles covers with his best friends Steve Brookes and Dave Waller, with whom he would form the first incarnation of The Jam in 1972.

With Weller’s father John taking the role of manager in 1975, the group would go on to become a signpost act of the punk era. They toured with the likes of The Clash, released a host of hugely successful records – classics All Mod Cons (1978), Setting Sons (1979) and Sound Affects (1980) included – and, thanks to Weller, crafted an astute, often political, but innately melodic sound that offered a sophisticated edge to the otherwise abrasive punk aesthetic.

By at the height of their powers in the early ‘80s, however, Weller began to feel limited by the group’s approach. To the shock of both his band and the music world, he disbanded The Jam in 1982, citing a want to explore Motown and northern soul music, and later forming jazz-pop group The Style Council. It was to be the first of countless shape-shifts for enigmatic songwriter, many of which would leave his fans and critics confounded.

But more than anything, Weller’s musical meanderings revealed an artist unwilling to temper is inclinations. Indeed, Weller would do just about anything – burn bridges, sack bands, break marriages – to follow his creative whims. His solo career has visited terrains as varied as stylised, groove-based jazz and electronica (1992’s Paul Weller), masterful, roots-flecked rock (1993’s Wild Wood), sophisticated modern soul (2002’s Illumination) and vibrantly organic and colour-drenched pop (2008’s 22 Dreams).

Weller’s vast sonic explorations, however, are not without a compass. More than perhaps any of British punk’s surviving artists, the man dubbed “The Modfather” has proven to be a true student of music and the art of songwriting. Though he may be misunderstood, for Weller, every song, every record and every musical tangent is a devout learning experience. 

Wake Up the Nation is out via Universal 

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, June 5, 2010.

WHAT Hiroharu Mori: Speech Rehearsals
WHERE Monash University Museum of Art, Faculty Gallery, Art and Design, Monash University, Caulfield Campus, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East, 9903 2882, monash.edu.au/muma

Having recently returned to his homeland after years living abroad, Japanese artist Hiroharu Mori’s video works espouse a tension between intimacy and distance. Using actors to perform source material gathered from internet chat forums and the public record, Mori explores notions of performance in contemporary Japanese society and the dichotomy of the public and private self in the context of the online environment. The large-screen, 37-minute video work Re: – afforded its own enclosed space in a darkened area at the back of the gallery – is a definite highlight. The piece sees an actor play the role of various Japanese housewives, each of whom muses about their household income, indulgences and monetary wants and needs. Lifted directly from an online chat forum, it gives a rare insight into topics seldom discussed among the Japanese middleclass, deftly revealing the behavioural shifts that occur in an online setting and the sheer scope for role-play in such an anonymous environment. The tryptic of video works Student Actors makes for another fascinating meditation on performance in public life, with three student acting groups rehearsing a seemingly farcical transcript of conversation, in fact held during a session of the Japanese parliament in 2005, in which now Prime Minister Taro Aso discusses the level to which UFOs have been considered in devising a national defence strategy. In Mori’s world – and, by association, ours – the line between fiction and reality is as porous as ever. Mon to Fri 10am–5pm, until June 25.

WHAT Peter Booth: Memories
WHERE Anna Schwartz Gallery, 185 Flinders Lane, city, 9654 6131, annaschwartzgallery.com

One of Australia’s most acclaimed artists, Peter Booth’s vast new collection eschews its initial proposition. Like the best of his work, this 72-strong series of compact (at times even minute) charcoal and pastel works may at first seem abject, but there are rays of hope and humanity amid the horrors. In parts, all seems lost. A man crouches naked on all fours, vomiting; another wanders from a mountain-scape of stripped human bones, carrying an ominous, bulging sack; a decapitated head lays lifeless amid ice-strewn debris, a pained expression forever etched. But as Booth’s thickset, stooped, scarred and maimed protagonists scratch, claw and brawl their way through the ice and snow and burnt out vestige of the post-industrial world, they are not alone. Indeed, there is a collectivity to their plight. There may be jostling and infighting (or even the sly fondle of a buttock) amid the assemblage, but there is also humour and strength. There are the considered, steeled expressions; there is the laughter on occasion. There is the small, impish man atop a rock (pictured, above), fists raised in one of the little victories over circumstance. Booth’s Memories may envision a world on the cusp, but he has not lost his faith in humanity. Tues to Fri noon–6pm, Sat 1pm–5pm, until June 19.

WHAT The Politics of Art
WHERE Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, 26 Acland Street, St Kilda, 9534 0099, lindenarts.org

Featuring new, commissioned works from a handful of leading Melbourne artists – Lou Hubbard, Alex Martinis Roe and Joel Birnie included – The Politics of Art interprets its title brief from a host of different vantages, from the macro-cultural to the intimate and personal. Both Geoff Newton and Philip Brophy’s works assume the guise of a snide, humorous critique art’s internal and commercial mechanisms. Newton’s collages merge sober gallery advertisements from Australian art magazines with raucous, vaguely patriotic 1970s cultural imagery to envisage a perhaps more realistic reflection of the art world – one filled with booze, good times and particularly Australian brand of unruliness – than the commercial art scene’s somewhat affected, haughty self-branding. Brophy’s photocopied T-shirt slogans, meanwhile, offer a litany of cheeky cultural affronts. “Did you just use the word ‘beautiful’ or did you just fart?” he poses on one. “Is that an opera based on a Peter Carey novel, or am I living in a cultural wasteland?” A clear standout is digital artist Kit Wise’s Fire (Kuwait, 1992), an augmented video work depicting night-vision airplane footage of the Kuwait oilfield fires of the first Gulf War. In a continuation of his sublime renderings of disaster scenes, the stretched, mirrored image – rear-projected onto a large, circular acrylic disc – is as disconcerting as it is spectacular. By exaggerating the aestheticism of what should read as horrific imagery, he prompts questions of the political means and agendas of such media representations and the cultural repercussions of bearing witness. Tues to Fri 1pm–5pm, Sat to Sun 11am–5pm, until June 27.

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