New Weird Australia x Fallopian Tunes
Now that the Walker Art Center’s field has dutifully absorbed all of the spilled Summit EPA post-Shlock the Garden, can we bask in the pale light of a less local, but equally underappreciated, music scene? Maybe just for an hour and a half? Cool. Toss that vomit-stained Hold Steady® commemorative t-shirt in the washing machine and let’s plunge into some Australian experimentalism.
Every other month or so the avant-garde radio program New Weird Australia releases a compilation of tunes from the New South Wales experimental community. Each collection is a gilt digital artifact of fresh composition, edgy-yet-accessible aesthetics, and solid cultural ambassadorship. For the latest compilation—called Gloss & Moss—NWA teamed up with a similarly Down Undered DIY electronica label, Fallopian Tunes. The team present starkly different sides of the continent’s underground music scene. Listen on the player below and download the compilation from Bandcamp.
The first half belongs to Fallopian Tunes, which chose eleven tracks of smooth ‘n’ throbbing bedroom electronica of various stripes. Although many of the featured artists operate in familiar genres—glitch, trance, beat tape—many songs are bolstered by found sounds and surprising noise samples. My go-to tracks on this side are “Ambulacra” by Jacob Silver, which sounds like you’re playing Nintendo 64 games on a double dose of Ambien, and “Now Let’s Sing It Again” by Exotic Snake, which makes me think of a more ruthless Four Tet.
New Weird Australia curated the second half of the compilation, and takes the album on a drastic left-turn. You’ll hear fuzzed-out dream pop, trudging kraut, and slow Eastern-influenced psych rock (a la Grails). In short, it sounds like a New Weird Australia compilation or broadcast. My favorites from this side are “Seriously” by Stag—free-jazz non-punk in the style of Black Eyes of Dismemberment Plan—and “Typewriter Demo 1A” by David Evans—a sample of a typewriter made rapturous.
And it goes without saying, you should download the entire New Weird Australia and Fallopian Tunes discography. Like, yesterday.
—Will Wlizlo
