- Pocketmoth have caught me really off guard. The nascent, Brisbane-based, electronic music label is promising to put out all sorts of interesting music from across Australia and, as their first gambit, have thrown together a little compilation, with a big-sounding name, Infinite Twist.
Actually the compilation itself isn’t little either. Although it’s hard to tell with these hype-building, promo releases, it sounds like Pocketmoth are already packing a whole roster of artists piling on board from across the sonic spectrum. Yeah it really is hard to tell, because many of the berths on the comp are taken by artists so grassroots they have virtually no online presence at all. Sorry if I’ve been looking in the wrong direction for your Facebook pages but Black Mannequin, Quincy Raw, Sargent Bonzo, I have no idea who you are! Doesn’t mean I don’t want to though. Pocketmoth have boldly fronted with some of the most obscure names right up the front of Infinite Twist and it feels like the right choice. Black Mannequin’s collaboration with Kevin Orr is eight-and-a-half minutes that has stylish echoes of the ghostly, bluesy UK garage of Burial, the dark ambient songwriting of Grouper and the gritty, urban melancholy of Massive Attack; Asphalt is a good name for it. Quincy Raw slides into second spot, maintaining the ambient sweetness, but swapping out the garage syncopation for some mid-tempo techno beats and having fun mutating them into all sorts of peeps and squeaks across the course of seven minutes that lap at your ears like gentle waves.Sargent Bonzo is a real revelation, packing reverb-drenched electro-rock that hits you emotively right from the get-go; the drumming in particular sounds great. That’s all before it tears itself apart in some kind of post-hardcore nightmare. Even then, unexpected but welcome.
After that outlier you’ll hear from the slightly better-known producers Christopher Brooks and Rahms bringing things back into line with a stylish, ambient techno before Sum Randm throws a fairly staid instrumental hip hop into the mix. Fortunately Randm justifies being there by overlaying a fuzzy and rambunctious synth melody that’s fierce indeed and finishing with a charming honky-tonk piano outro.
Rahms comes back solo with some middle-eastern worldbeat that crawls up the spine ominously. Tils' offering is a frisky dance collage that sounds like it’s largely been pasted together from repurposed samples. mixed business keeps you guessing, even this late into the evening, with a latin tinged, dancey prog-rock called Dankasa Mood. RDGR takes an even more classic approach to instrumental hip hop, sandwiching boom bap with bluesy synth horns and samples of AM radio voiced media types trying to get their heads round what those dang hippies are about. Just as you’re about to put on your coat, the evening ends with a slowly, inexorably building tidal wave of distorted synth that sounds like it was borrowed from the tortured mind of Ben Frost.
Hope you don’t mind the blow-by-blow account, but really I know so little else about what’s going on with Pocketmoth, except that they’ve got all these folks making a whole range of exciting sounds. Whatever the future holds, it starts, quite tantilisingly, right here on Infinite Twist.
- Chris Cobcroft.