Sasha Margolis from AUTOMATING & CONSTANTLIGHT was a guest on the NWA radio show mid-August. We played his new CONSTANTLIGHT EP in full – which you can now download free at constantlight.bandcamp.com.

New Sydney producer GHOST_ also appeared on the NWA show recently and played a live set, backed by guitarist BLACK PYRAMID. He’s made the full set available for free download at ghostmusic.bandcamp.com

More free release material – from LUCIA DRAFT (NWA2). Her debut EP ‘A Pile Of Skeletons’ is now available for free download via Lesstalk Records.

ALPS (from NWA3 and our 2010 St Petersburg show) has a new (very limited) split live cassette with New Zealand’s Forest Spirits — get them before they’re gone at alps.bigcartel.com.

Another release featuring two artists from NWA4 – Sydney’s TEXTILE AUDIO and GENTLEFORCE. ‘The Pomegranate EP’ is TEXTILE AUDIO’s debut EP, featuring her unique mix of experimental sound and contemporary opera, released via Feral Media. The release comes complete with a GENTLEFORCE remix, who will shortly become one of the few Australian artists to feature on a ‘Wire Tapper’ compilation CD from the renowned Wire Magazine.

TOM HALL, who recently played our ‘Refraction vs New Weird Australia’ show has been signed under his AXXONN guise by Brisbane’s Useless Art Records. He’s released a new single ‘Lets Get it Straight’, ahead of a new album release in mid-October. axxonnband.blogspot.com

Line-ups are starting to be released for the 2010 This Is Not Art Festival, and the component parts Electro Fringe and Sound Summit, held in Newcastle NSW the first weekend in OCtober.. There’s an avalanche of great Australian music, including many NWA favourites such as TANTRUMS, DOT.AY, KYU, SCATTERED ORDER, COLLARBONES,. HOLY BALM, BLANK REALM, NO ANCHOR and more TBA.

Release, tour, other news?  Let us know – info at newweirdaustralia dot com.

Title: New Weird Australia, Volume Four
Catalogue Number: NWA004
Released: January 2010

Free Download

Tracklisting:

1. TEXTILE AUDIO, Some Kind Of Mininova (5:32)
2. PAINT YOUR GOLDEN FACE, Television Is About Picture (4:12)
3. REUNION SACRED IBIS, Sing It To The Mountains (2:11)
4. TANTRUMS, Beat The Happy Pavement (4:08)
5. SCATTERED ORDER MK 1, Ruined By Me (5:44)
6. ALISTER SPENCE TRIO, Two Halves Of The Moon (3:26)
7. SCISSOR LOCK, Codify (2:05)
8. GUTTER PARTIES, Sashi (2:15)
9. NO ZU, Lay Of The Land (4:25)
10. THE TOWNHOUSES, Jigsaws Under The Clouds (4:08)
11. SEAWORTHY, They’re Cicadas You Know? (3:55)
12. GENTLEFORCE, Our Last Day Together (4:30)
13. GOLD TANGO, Telescope (3:26)
14. ALPEN, A Meditation On Flight (3:16)
15. RED_ROBIN, The Surveyor (4:36)
16. AUTOMATING, When Use Becomes Abuse (9:19)
17. SILVER BULLETIN, Minding Time (4:13)

Compiled by Stuart Buchanan & Danny Jumpertz.
Artwork by Anna Vo, annavo.wordpress.com.

Click artist title for background information and links.
All music donated by the artists for use in this compilation only, all rights reserved.
All tracks previously unreleased, except: 6. from ‘Fit’ ; 8. from ‘Marooned EP’ ; 9. from ‘Graffiti EP’; 13. from ‘Gold Tango EP’.

Sleeve Notes: January 2010

What’s in a name?

In attempting to find answer that question, and thus establish a title for this very project, there was a solitary guiding idea – that the artists shared a deep common bond, beyond just an experimental approach to music making. In their own unique ways, we believe that each artist on New Weird Australia shares a disdain for any cabals of musical ‘authority’, an irreverence to established industry etiquette, a rejection of art neutered for acceptability, and ultimately a dismissal of ‘rules of behaviour’ in contemporary music practice. Their music exists in an autonomous zone of their own construction, unburdened by any sense of what ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ occur.

In broader Australian culture, the comedic variant of this sensibility is often referred to as ‘larrakinism’ – characterised by the mischievous or outlandish ‘larrakin’, who gleefully flaunts regulations and standards set down by society. The nemesis of every po-faced ‘do-gooder’ in the country, the larrikin takes the piss, flaunts convention, and pushes buttons and boundaries with great abandon.

Although this action is universal, the word ‘larrikin’ is perceived as a quintessentially Australian definition, with roots as far back as the 1860s. In one of its earliest occurrences, the larrikin is beautifully cited as a “young urban rough”, although its lexicological roots suggest it was born of a conjunction between ‘leery’ (‘wide awake’ or ‘knowing’) and ‘kinchin’ (‘youngster’). Most of its recorded use in the late nineteenth century always seemed to involve both thievery and mischievousness.

Transgressions against boundaries or conventions, rejection of norms and standards handed down by an authority, all wrapped in a roughish youthful spirit – whichever way you cut it, the larrikin sensibility is writ large in New Weird Australia. No more so than in this particular volume – where Textile Audio takes both classical and operatic blueprints, and weaves them around found sounds and abstract electronica; Tasmanian duo Paint Your Golden Face rethink and reshape the fundamental essence of the male voice choir; Reunion Sacred Ibis cuts a sharp sheath through archival sounds in a spirited slice of plunderphonics; Gold Tango reinvent Kraftwerk with an unexpected tribal swagger; and Scattered Order stick two well-placed fingers up against the very idea of ‘heritage rock’, their original line-up reforming after over 25 years, with their innovative touch still absolutely to the fore – delivering an exclusive cut from their (very) long-awaited new album.

This entirely Australian larrakin paradigm – an irreverence to a learned authority, maverick thievery, a rejection of etiquette – it may help to explain why ‘New Weird Australia’ is ripped directly from ‘New Weird America’, a phrase coined by Scottish journalist David Keenan in 2003 to define a new breed of American psychedelic folk or ‘free folk’. Since then, ‘New Weird America’ has been used in a variety of ever changing contexts – cited in artandpopularculture.com as “[finding] inspiration in such disparate sources as heavy metal, free jazz, electronic music, noise music, tropicália, and early- and mid-20th century American folk music”. Any perceived rules of definition are clearly dubious.

‘New Weird Australia’ does what it says on the tin. It’s new, weird, Australian music. Thus, we felt compelled to appropriate (nay, thieve!) Keenan’s nomenclature for our own ends. Sure, it’s a bastardisation. Sure, it’s wrong-headed. But if in the rejection of a guarded sense of ‘what is right’, we put even more noses out of joint, then more power to us. And while the odd prude may cry ‘plagiarism’, they might well be missing the point.

Consider it even more broadly, reduce it to its simple acronym. The letters N,W and A. And, there once again, for a second time over, we steal where we shouldn’t steal from, we tread on toes that we shouldn’t tread on – in fact, we clearly reject any notions of what we should and shouldn’t do. An ideal I’m sure both the American freak folksters and the late Eazy-E would readily connect with.

Press:

Cyclic Defrost “favourite of the series so far… some brilliant music from both known and unknown artists always lurking around the corner”

Now Like Photographs, Minneapolis – Record Of The Week “If you need a primer on what is fresh from Australia’s music scene, look no further than New Weird Australia.”

Electrorash “More eclectic, eccentric and often amazingly beautiful tunes … pick up the whole shebangabang for $0.00 AUD. That spells value in 4568 of the approximately 5000 recorded spoken languages known to linguists.”

Daily Beatz (on Tantrums from NWA4) “Could New Weird Australia be the Australian counterpart to Ann Arbor’s Ghostly International? Based solely on this song, I would say yes.”

Throw Shapes Interview

Gentleforce is the music and art moniker of Eli Murray. Within sonic realms Eli is interested in the fusion of repetition, minimalism and organic sounds to create a world of warm electronic soundscapes and pulsing rhythms. Combining a laptop with various instruments, he attempts to build sounds that the listener can lose themselves within.  Gentleforce‘s forthcoming release - the next instalment in Feral Media’s POWWOW series – is due later in 2010.

www.myspace.com/gentleforcemusic

Gentleforce appears on ‘New Weird Australia, Volume Four‘.