Touching Extremes (IT)

This limited edition of 500 copies is the recorded testimony of an evening at the Northcote Social Club in Melbourne where two sonic entities gravitating around the orbit of 12k – plus the label boss himself – graced the membranes of the participants with a stimulating ambient-related piece each, “despite the ghosts of BBC hijacking the audio system” as Deupree reports. Solo Andata, the duo of Paul Fiocco and Kane Ikin, presented a delicately excruciating, diaphanous pastel where the calmness of the instrumental deployment orientates the character of the music towards the charms that only conscious melancholy can generate in a curious pot-pourri of oriental ceremonials and interfering urban hum that facilitates complete relaxation. Seaworthy’s core member is Cameron Webb, a scientist of the environment who uses his own field recordings in extremely easy to the ears compositions based on gentle guitars and loops, quite reminiscent of Eno in their scarcely surprising, somehow reassuring progressions and – well, yes – Fripp in the conclusive junction of suspended, slightly saturated harmonics, although sweetened by dreamy clean toned arpeggios. Taylor Deupree closes the show with a hypnotizing segment where everything appears as recognizable yet actually isn’t. What sounds like a repeated pluck of electric guitar strings stands out in a foggy static soundscape whose motionlessness is just a creation of the mind, as instead ripples and rivulets of self-reproducing viscous materials submerge any tentative opposition to this granular status quo. To paraphrase early Peter Gabriel, a river of constant, if scarcely visible change.