New Noise: Rituals, Fazmo, Danger Beach, Shiny Coin

This week’s roundup of new music offers three rounds of instrumentals and one shot of scrappy sweetness.

– A few weeks ago we stumbled onto the Soundcloud page for Melbourne producer Rituals and it was love – or at least palpable fondness – at first listen. Now there’s a brand new tape, Ceramic Spaces, that literally just came out yesterday. Limited to 50 copies with artwork by Rachel Archibald but also up for any-price download, it continues with the fogged-out ambience and found-sound uncertainty of those previous tracks. The eight short pieces prize a certain degree of formlessness – although there’s a hooky rhythmic spine to the standout track ‘Prisms’ – yet also arrive steeped in thick, moody atmosphere. It’s the kind of layered, ambient shapeshifting that soaks deep into your pores.

– Fazmo is Andre Fazio from fuzz-loving Melbourne five-piece YIS. He released the free 10-track album The Fazmo back in June, which has only now come to our attention thanks to the rocket-riddled video for opener ‘Major League Hall of Famers’. As Fazio explains it, “This album has been a work in progress. I began production in 2012 while I was on tour in Europe playing punk music.” Using Garageband, Archive.org and samples from ageing demos, he put together an album of warm and noisy synthstrumentals and odd left turns. Among the latter is ‘X-Ray Eyes’, featuring a snide vocal turn from Boz of Pornscars. Between the Office Space sample in ‘Triumph’ and more arcane film grabs elsewhere, it’s a pretty eccentric record. But despite its hodgepodge, genre-less nature, it’s a surprisingly dependable listen the whole way through.

– The last we heard from Danger Beach was the cinematic 2013 opus Pacific, which came out on Dream Damage, the label that gave the world TV Colours. Now Canberra’s Lachlan Thomas has shared a pair of new instrumentals with the world. ‘Accelerate’ is a dark prowler stoking the friction between agitated programmed beats and wonky guitar riffing. It plays like an alternate soundtrack to Road Blasters. ‘Unhallowed’, on the other hand, is slow and larded with church-y organ, pairing it with sputtering beats for unhurried eeriness. There’s also a newly updated (and much fuzzier) version of the 2010 track ‘Apollo’ that’s worth checking out.

– Shiny Coin’s self-titled, four-song, any-price EP has been out since February – with cover art by Adrian Hogan – but it’s new to us. The Melbourne trio play sweet and scrappy, punk-flirting pop that flashes back to ’90s-era lo-fi charms. They say they write “short, honest pop songs,” which on the EP means tunes about pirates, tofu and Seinfeld. That said, ‘Babe’ is more of an earnest love song, in all the right ways. (And even ‘Seinfeld’ is romantic in the end.) Shiny Coin are playing this Sunday (Sept 14) at The Grace Darling (upstairs from 6pm) with Birds With Thumbs, Maggot Men and Angry Seas, and at The Old Bar’s I Do Like Monday series on Monday, September 22 with Empat Lima and Wet Lips. They’re also playing the newish DIY venue Dropout in Yarraville on Saturday, October 4, helping to launch Volume 3 of the punk/art zine Homo Gestalt alongside Infinite Void, Becalm, Halt Ever and The World at a Glance; more info here.

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To nominate new music for this column, email us at news@messandnoise.com.