Features
Track By Track: Leafy Suburbs
Contributions by Lyndon Blue
Original page credit: Mess+Noise
Perth musician LYNDON BLUE – now living in Melbourne – started Leafy Suburbs to integrate ambient, drone and field recordings. It’s since grown to encompass much more, culminating in the debut album ‘Slow Light’.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
‘Concrete Jungle’
Musique concrète (as you might know already) is a term coined by a French bloke (Pierre Schaeffer) in the 1940s, and refers to a compositional approach where recordings of sounds in the world become the main resource – to be arranged, spliced and manipulated. ‘Jungle’ comes from the Sanskrit word jangala, which means ‘uncultivated land’. Some days I walk around recording birds and newspapers and footsteps and water (etc.), and try to work the scraps into something that sounds interesting. But I used a synth in this tune, which Pierre probably wouldn’t have liked. My favourite sound on this track is the call of the Tawny Frogmouth, which I recorded at Perth Zoo; it drops in at about 1:34.
‘Machete Beat’
A couple of years ago, some friends and I somehow ended up with free rein over an empty cottage in East Perth for a few days. We held an art exhibition and fiddled with homemade instruments and loop pedals. While my friend Alex and I were jamming, this little bass line, melody and rhythm emerged. To me it sounded like a humid trudge through the undergrowth, one hand hacking at the thicket.
‘Garden Path/Expensive Illusion’
The Perth Cultural Centre is a curious place, and I have a love/hate relationship with it. There’s a giant TV in the middle. There’s a busker who sits near the overpass to the train station, playing guitar and harmonica. I recorded him too; he’s on this track.
‘Aquifer’
Acoustic piano is one of those wholesome and timeless sounds you just shouldn’t fuck with. So one day I decided to fuck with it. Obviously I’m not the first person to do that, but I’d really been enjoying the way people like Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), James Blake, Darren Cunningham (Actress) and Laurel Halo approached traditional instruments (and voice), warping them, subverting them, turning them inside out, often in quite subtle ways. I decided this tune sounded kind of like an aquifer, a rocky subterranean expanse with liquid bleeding through it.
‘Nessus’
Leafy Suburbs started mostly as an ambient/drone/field-recordings project, and I guess this track falls under that umbrella. The word ‘Nessus’ was a typo in this instance, but it’s also the name of centaur from Greek mythology who became a ferryman on the river Eunos. Heracles killed Nessus with poison arrows, but then ended up accidentally wearing a shirt with Nessus’s poisoned blood on it, which burnt him to death. The more you know…
‘Lazy Microbes’
Delia Derbyshire, best known for realising/co-writing the Doctor Who theme, is one of my favourite ever composers and electronic musicians. Among her abundant short works is one called ‘Busy Microbes’ (you can find it on Glo-Spot’s Electrosonic compilation). Delia would spend hours, weeks, months working on elaborate tape loops, recording samples, running things through analog filters and oscillators. My own microbes feel very lazy by comparison.
‘Amphitheatre’
Most of the tunes on this record are either inspired by a specific place or intended to evoke one. The ascending bass line in this tune may or may not bring to mind the terraced structure of an amphitheatre. Amphitheatres are cool, anyway: the Ancient Greeks laid out the theatre at Epidaurus in a tiered limestone semicircle, which allowed the site itself to function as an acoustic filter minimising low-frequency background noise. Clever.
‘Barrow Pipes’
A barrow is either a tomb, a town, a crater on the moon, a river, a pig or a hand-propelled vehicle for carrying. I recently moved into a house on Barrow Street in Brunswick East. When (if) you do the dishes, the plumbing make a beautiful low-pitched drone sound. You can hear it in this track. There’s also a great hum from the drinks fridge at 7-11.
‘Kids Around’
This one is for the dancefloor.
‘Machete Beat (reprise) ’
This is the original looped bass guitar recording from when the idea for ‘Machete Beat’ emerged at Claeg Cottage, East Perth. We were sitting on some floorboards in an empty lounge room with an empty fireplace, and I think Eleventeen Eston was rehearsing in the next room maybe.
‘Westend’
It seemed appropriate to finish the record with something that tied most of the threads together: rhythm, ambience, melody, noise, cleanliness, decay, acoustic/organic sounds (the congas, guitar) and electronic sounds (the synthesiser, drum machine, effects units). I hope a few people manage to dance to this one too.
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