Date Course Pentagon Royal Garden
Report From Iron Mountain

The Roundtable: ...Welcome to the strange musical world of Tolley & Dara, an experimental duo whose incredible music held a marginal yet vital position on the fringe of the Australian music industry during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Consisting of jazz bassist and synthesist David Tolley and percussionist Dure Dara, their union was a relationship of romance and intense creativity, a deep spiritual bond consecrated amidst banks of modular synthesizers and racks of exotic percussion instruments. Recorded over a series of live performances in the spring of 1979, the music featured on Cutheart was edited and assembled from eight improvised pieces recorded at the Universal Theatre Melbourne. Comprised of analogue synthesizers and a vast array of tuned and non-tuned percussion, Tolley and Dara sculpted a cluster of electronic abstractions and organic splashes of Gamelan-influenced percussion; a dense otherworldly soundscape coloured with trance-like vocal scatting and deranged muttering. Known for his bass playing on the classic Australian jazz-rock album Carlton Streets by The Brian Brown Quintet and also as a member of EX-, (the collaborative project with Daevid Allen from Soft Machine/Gong), Cutheart sees Tolley explore the outer realms of heady improvised electronic music. While the music of Tolley & Dara exists in a sonic universe all of it’s own, similarities could easily be drawn to another likeminded musical partnership, the American husband and wife duo Annette Peacock and Paul Bley. Cutheart is a pioneering recording of extended synthesiser and percussion technique from the Australian experimental underground.

Comfortnoise: ...Ever since it was founded in 2003, Comfortnoise has featured events, podcasts, and texts rotating around mighty basslines in Techno and Dub. Now, NEW.COM («new-dot-com»), head of Comfortnoise, emerges with four of his own productions exploring the depths of dancefloor, even soundsystem-oriented music:«Mountainous Conquest» piles up a ground-shaking bassline interspersed with breezy percussion and a fragmented melodica theme. «Mental Canoe» lays out an utmost stripped-down, metallically droning Reggae tune, while «Green Plunder» presents a nasty, shattering, technoid roller. Finally, percussion-oriented «Ravings Of Rock» playfully swings between stops and goes, seabed and rain clouds. The EP casually follows a powerfully eloquent poem by Carribean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite (r.i.p.) and closes with this pretty evident line: «The Unity Is Submarine».

Seance Centre: ...Music of the Five Elements is not only the “acoustic massage” that McClellan set out to make, but is a fully realized and peerless piece of music. Taking cues from Minimalism (Tony Conrad / La Monte Young), American Primitive guitar (Fahey & Basho) and even psychedelia, the album is a continuous sound voyage for voice, synthesizer, guitar, bowed bass, piano, effects and ciao (Chinese flute) all played by McClellan himself. Although divided into sections, the journey is best undertaken as a whole, without distraction. As McClellan himself wrote in the original liner notes:“The optimum effect of Music of the Five Elements will be achieved if each side of this recording is played through, from beginning to end without interruption. Music of the Five Elements, when used as a meditational or body work tool, rather than entertainment, will increase in effect over time. Overplaying or improper use, however, may eventually diminish its designed effect”The prescription for this album: play it loud and heal yourself. Remixed and remastered from the original reels and cut using DMM for the purest dose possible.