“Australia” (Used 37 times)

New Editions, an offshoot label imprint for New Weird Australia, winds up its schedule with two new albums – from Thomas William vs Scissor Lock and Strange Forces. Since launching in 2010, the series has released albums and EPs from Caught Ship, Blake Freele, Paneye, TANTRUMS, No Zu, Kris Keogh, Forenzics and Spartak. Each release has been available in both physical and digital formats.

The final two releases in the series see Sydney experimental electronic artists Thomas William and Scissor Lock coming together for their debut collaborative release, ‘Jewelz‘, as well as the first Australian physical release for Brisbane psych-rock ex-pats Strange Forces, who have been tearing up a storm in Berlin over the last two years.

Both releases are available for download in full from FMA:

Stream / Download 'Jewelz' by Thomas William vs Scissor Lock

Stream / Download 'Strange Forces' by Strange Forces

Ducks Battle Satan on Thomas William vs Scissor Lock: "Like Sigur Ros mixed with Pimmon with Birchville Cat Motel producing the most wonderful chill out experimentronica ... both transcendent and challenging, Jewlez is a very fine release indeed."

20jazzfunkgreats on Strange Forces: "Rattling, monstrous invocations of acid-rock breakdowns both mental and musical ... The Old Ones would be proud."

Sound Summit's official festival soundtrack is now available for you to stream and download right here - via the Free Music Archive!

Sea Woof is the first full-length by Holly McNaught, aka Poland, from Melbourne Australia. She previously released an EP in 2006, and both are available from Pocketclock, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike source for "The Sound of Young Melbourne since 2002."

SOTR described this 13-track album pretty well as "a bewildering, amusing electronic song cycle." And it's inspired by The Sea-Wolf, a 1904 psychological adventure novel by American novelist Jack London. The book is in the public domain, so you can download it here at Google Books.

If you like Poland (FMA / Pocketclock), you might also enjoy Pregnant, High Places, and Lucky Dragons.

Isaac's punk roots don't really come out in his debut album "Empty Vessels," but his fantastic and somtimes playful ("Photographs and Histories") song-writing certainly do.  The variety of influences certainly do make appearances; blues, folk, singer-songwriter and sciffle all make appearances.  If not a direct homage to sciffle, the use of chair and drumsticks for the drum recording only fail to deliver that homage because they sound so good.  While mostly a singer and his guitar, a variety of other instruments make appearances; harmonica, piano, violin.  One would also be remiss if they didn't mention Isaac's progressive leanings, obvious in a track title like Karl Marx and the Reds and stated influences such as Billy Bragg.

The punk roots come out out on the myriad of cover songs recorded on his YouTube page.  Frank Turner, formerly of post-hardcore band Million Dead, also choose one Isaac's song to be featured on one of his albums and despite my opinion it doesn't belong, that doesn't stop punknews.org from giving it a review.

Despite an otherwise glowing review, punknews.org points out that the variety of influences coming into the album might not be for everyone.  If the DIY production values coveted by the punk and folk scenes don't do it for you, you'll just have to wait for the much-anticipated second album where Isaac is sure to hone his sound.  Hell, if you're a production snob, make sure you donate to the cause of getting him in a studio.  One thing is for sure - Isaac Graham is a rising star in Creative Commons music.

Find out more during the Music Manumit Podcast's interview with the head of his label, Copyleft Records, and then an interview with Isaac himself.

Last year, we shifted the focus of the New Weird Australia compilation series away from a free-for-all approach to something that would have a sharper curatorial focus. Something you could put handles around (so to speak).  Something you could clearly identify as “a compilation about X or Y or Z”. “We Are After All Here”, volume eight in our compilation series, does have a theme and identity of sorts, but defining it becomes increasingly problematic. Let me explain:

Throughout 2009 and 2010, we were listening to a heap of bands and artists that were clearly starting to coalesce into some form of vague and abstract grouping. Either through sound, technique, image, a reverence for the past, or just a common, skewed take on a hauntalogical notion, there was a broad church emerging that would count these artists among their flock.

Fortunately, no one dared to define it. If you speak of the devil, he’s sure to appear, thus keeping quiet and refusing to conform to definition worked well for all concerned. Having no such definition, and thus having artists co-opted or excluded based solely on the whims of the individual listener, was the perfect scenario.

But, of course, someone had to define it, and in doing so, they killed it. Hipster Runoff dropped ‘chillwave’, The Wire started talking about ‘hypnogogic pop’.  Then followed glo-fi, witch house, drag, screw gaze and so on and so on. (Our favourite remains ‘crunk shoegaze’ – meaningless, yet somehow quite endearing).

The list of artists lumped together under these various microgenres was often contradictory and bafflingly random – they were subsumed to the will of the writer, desperate to force round pegs into square holes. And once this grouping was anointed with such dubious definitions, the scrutiny began – spotlights were shone in all manner of places, and backlashes naturally came thereafter. The edifice soon crumbled.

We, on the other hand, are (after all) here – ‘down under’ – doing our own thing, far removed from such recklessness. We have our own obliquely connected and amoebic group of similar artists, remaining unaffected by trend, hype or weak stylistic interpretation. And it is to this group that we turn for this compilation. If, by virtue of their geography, they had birthed their projects in North America, they might well have all been raped and pillaged by now – raked over the blogeratti coals for their part in an ill-defined ‘scene’.

Although our upside-down location can often be a curse, in this case it’s a blessing – all these artists survived unscathed, their mission no more or less impossible, living another day to ‘fight the good fight’. And we shall leave this group unnamed, for all our sakes. Suffice to say, it’s another new, weird slice through the unsung underground of abnormal Australian music.

DOWNLOAD / STREAM FULL RELEASE HERE

Sample tracks from the release: