Pinch Shackleton
Pinch & Shackleton

Seance Centre: ...We humans, the nascent beings that we are, still haven’t quite figured out the full potential of music. Dancing, meditating, emoting, protesting; these are all pretty basic. But what if we communicated more complex ideas with music? What if we codified all of our activities with music? This idea came to composer Joanne Forman when she was commissioned to create the soundscape for an environmental exhibition of sculpture called Artifacts from an Alien Civilization in 1987. The sculptures, elaborate ruins that had been found on the moon, begged the question: who created them and for what purpose? Joanne Forman imagined that Earth’s moon was a vacation spot for advanced beings from another galaxy. Cave Vaults of the Moon became a collection of sonic texts describing the fun things that went on there; earth-viewing, collecting information, building and playing. In her mind the sculptures in the exhibit were the remnants of a deserted playground of moon castles.

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.

Scrnxxxsdhw: ...Screen Shadow is an amorphous presence slithering through electronic music’s dark, jagged and dreamy corridors. Emerging this January with a duo of debut EPs, Black (Vegan Tinder Lord) and White (Hexxex) , the shadowy project blends pummelling techno, industrial grit and experimental noise for a mood-spanning sound inspired by everything from Google Street View to visiting the dentist.The Black EP gleans from the heavier end of the club music spectrum, plunging into a hardcore well of nosebleed kicks and synapse-frying synths that bang with raw dancefloor energy. The White EP pauses for reflection, transforming Screen Shadow’s spiky reveries into tightly-woven technicolour dreamscapes.