Features
New Noise: Drunk Elk, Kell//ua, Telling, The Atlas Room
By Mess+Noise
Three ambient-tinged tracks collide with one Drunk Elk in this week’s roundup of new music.
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– Okay, not strictly the newest of noise, but that’s only because of the roundabout journey that Drunk Elk’s album Oceanus Procellarum has taken. It started out with a tape release last year via Doctor Guten Tag Records, upon which it was glowingly compared to Mad Nanna, Pin Group and the Xpressway and Siltbreeze back catalogues. Then it got reissued earlier this year on 150-run vinyl through Wormwood Grasshopper. Now the vinyl is getting launched with gigs in Melbourne and Sydney this weekend. Whatever the meandering path, we’re just glad that more people can hear the Hobart band’s spindly, gloomy musings, which take outsider guitar jangle into some truly unnerving places. As The Native Cats’ Julian Teakle put it when singling out the band in a Hobart wrap circa 2012: “Drunk Elk have become one of the most starkly gripping bands to come out of Hobart in years, both on disc and live.” Launch dates below, with more info here.
Fri, Aug 29 – The Tote (upstairs), Melbourne, VIC [8:30pm, w/Crude/Encounter Group, Mad Nanna + DJ Pete Bramley]
Sat, Aug 30 – 107 Projects, Sydney, NSW [8pm, w/Knitted Abyss + Shebeen Queen]
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– Another left-field score from the Fallopian Tunes hit factory, Secondary Dwellings is a six-song EP by Kell//ua. That, in turn, is the guise of Melbourne-based Tassie native Simon Gardam, a visual artist and producer as well as drummer for New Noise vets Trjaeu. Secondary Dwellings follows last year’s free-download Overfolds and is described as “a selection of evolving loops, samples and sequences that unfold like scrap pages from a sketchbook.” It’s formless in the best sense, drifting and morphing through fogged-up ambience with no strict sense of what is and isn’t possible. Selections like ‘Aqua Static’ are also just super beautiful. It’s out now digitally and on 20-run lathe-cut 10” vinyl. Kell//ua is playing live tomorrow (Aug 28) at the third instalment of Fallopian Tunes’ monthly “Sound Splashes” series at Ferdydurke in Melbourne, along with Rituals, 3RRR’s Didvid.S (DJ set) and Fallopian Tunes DJs. More info here.
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– After materialising last year, for a long time Telling had only the debut single – and Bertie Blackman cover – ‘Stella’ to their name. But now the team-up between the on-a-roll Tim Shiel (Double J, Gotye) and Nashville/Melbourne singer/songwriter Ben Abraham has doubled its songbook, thanks to new single ‘How It Ends’. They’ve even played a first gig, supporting Lower Spectrum recently at The Toff. Self-described as an “icy sad pop song,” ‘How It Ends’ is indeed teary and fragile yet strongly vocal-based, but let’s not neglect to mention the flickering rhythms that brighten the mix from its third minute. To us, in fact, this is actually much warmer than it is icy, especially as Abraham’s processed vocals grow more and more confident.
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– The Atlas Room is the genre-blurring work of Melbourne tinkerer Ezekiel Kigbo Jr. His new EP Berlin is a split with acoustic songwriter project From Trees. Kigbo’s three tracks are very serene yet humming with crackly fluctuations. There are shades of minimalism and even New Age, not to mention the starker side of the Warp canon. It’s out as a name-your-price download or 25-run 10” via the link above. Also check out Kigbo’s day-old track ‘Foreign Beauty’, his contribution to a project where composers soundtrack a two-and-a-half-minute work of silent video art.
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