Tom Richards
Pink Nothing

Provenance: ...The contemplative and stretched out twin to last year’s A Body of Full Of Tears, Sia Ahmad continues to revisit her most formative inspirations on Facade, blurring aged textures into contemporary expressions on this newest addition to the Shoeb Ahmad oeuvre.Less claustrophobic than ABFOT and clearer in sonic detail, Facade picks up threads of familial reality, gendered safety and mapping place to weave into a tapestry of disembodied found sound, lush harmonies and widescreen metronomic presence. Once forgotten and now again inhabited, the songs here continue a journey to reclaim what drove Ahmad to create and explore.All profits from sales go towards ongoing contributions made to Aboriginal Legal NSW/ACT and Pay The Rent.

ORANGE MILK RECORDS: ...Drop Shadow is the new album from New Zealand native Luke Rowell, and his first release under the Eyeliner name since 2015’s Buy Now (Beer on the Rug). The album is filled with highly composed MIDI pop music that covers a range of mood and emotion, from the uplifting Vince DiCola-esque opener to the beautiful digital vocal “ahh”s that merge into crashing waves at the end of “Keep Calm”. Rowell is using the language of instrumental dance and pop to express multiple themes, the first being personal loss and caring for a sick loved one, as reflected on the suite of songs from “Contact” to “Carry On”. At the albums center these songs form a sort of emotional core that also reframe lighter pieces like “Coffee News” as mini respites along the way.Drop Shadow also explores Rowell’s fascination with American and Japanese music culture and their many intersections, most evident to me on the upbeat “Drop Shadow” which utilizes the Korg Wavestatoion and M1 VST (which is the highest selling synth of all time in its hardware form) and lands somewhere between early house music, a Madonna instrumental, and something from a Nintendo 64 soundtrack.If the previous Eyeliner album LARP of Luxury can be seen as a sunrise record and BUY NOW as night time music, Drop Shadow goes from morning to night and back again. Songs like “Reverie” can feel bright and head-nodding on first listen, only to shift into a hopeful melancholy the second time through.

ORANGE MILK RECORDS: ...Japan’s Nobuyuki Sakuma is a prolific artist; formerly of the Jesse Ruins duo on the Captured Tracks label, he now shifts time between his electronic music project CVN, curating the mix series Grey Matter Archives, and chief editor duties at Avyss Magazine. “I.C.” will be his second album for Orange Milk as CVN, and it is an eclectic hybrid of beat music and abstract electronics. There is a searching quality in his music, with leaps in variation from track to track that are meant to elicit the mutating feelings of walking through Tokyo.The first track 成分 Seibun is a calm pop song featuring Japanese vocalist NTsKi, and feels like an initial encounter with nocturnal cityscapes. As the album progresses a stranger Japanese electronic music culture begins to emerge, referencing artists like good friend Foodman and label partner Koeosaeme with irreverent assertions of anti-genre music making. Tracks like “Snippets of Heaven” are reminiscent of music on the labels PAN or Halcyon Veil, cryptic and sparse with random industrial beats and scraping metal. “舌下 (Karaoke)” is a more forlorn piece with straightforward rhythm and deeply effecting use of repetition. Sakuma states that he lets mood dominate his track making and does not care if this transitioning emotion fits into a cohesive style. The skill of harnessing the random nature of each tracks aesthetic is impressive, resulting in an exciting record that faithfully documents its creators place and time.

Efficient Space: ...3AM Spares is a new compilation of Australian Electronic Dance Music selected by Andras and Instant Peterson, encompassing the darker sounds and later nights of the 1990s and beyond. Following on from forerunner compilation Midnite Spares, this double LP draws from local 12” releases, CDRs and the archives of community radio station 3RRR FM to make a diverse and pumping scene audible once more. No longer confined to beer barns and back rooms, this generation of producers, DJs, clubbers and ravers spilled out into pavilions, warehouses and paddocks, embracing a new culture of machine-metaphor and chemical love.Future Sound of Melbourne’s warehouse triptych Resist The Beat embodies a time when the country’s youth united with juggernaut stamina, partying beyond the long arm of the law. Restored from the ARIA award-winning trio’s original DATs, this debut 12” incited label offers from Jeff Mills, Frank De Wulf and Carl Cox.Released by the likes of Clan Analogue, Creative Vibes, Volition, DanceNet, Juice and Psy-Harmonics, this era’s material has evaded sufficient digital documentation until now, some lost in the decommission of Angelfire, Tripod and Geocities websites. Often these bedroom experiments and one-off collaborations existed solely for compilation inclusions, a plausible scenario for the mysterious Inner Harmony. In the case of Tetrphnm, graphic artist Jeremy Dower’s glacial sub-bass was digitised from the only known CD-R copy, preserved by the 3RRR FM library.