- Music should be understood as a historical exercise just as much as it is considered a creative one. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” as the saying goes. Those who remember the past today seem similarly condemned to repeat it despite their best efforts. But that’s more likely the fault of the rest of their peers who fail to remember and condemn others to simply repeating past victories ad infinitum. “No man is an island” as another saying goes.
Jay & Yuta are two shipwrecked musicians floating on an island composed of their respective record collections. Neither have the public profile or apparent desire to be recognised outside of their work, though what they’ve done in other groups like Low Life, Orion, Oily Boys and The Rangoons could surely have made a lesser musician's career by now. The music they make together is based around a limited palette of old drum machines, warbly bass, meandering synths and the duo’s contrasting vocal and lyrical styles.
The musical direction seems particularly indebted to the work and legacy of a particular couple of pioneering Australian DIY labels. Firstly, Innocent which was run by the quadruple-threat Philip Brothy and David Chesworth of Essendon Airport, and secondly MSquared which was run by Michael Tee and Mitch Jones, both best known for their work in Scattered Order. Both labels were short-lived, youthful explorations within the unimaginative drudgery of the early '80’s Australian music industry which was generally not permissive of their artistic exploits, incompatible with their lack of traditional business sense and scornful of their perceived musical naivety. It seems almost like an act of self-aware homage to these platonically monogamous musical unions that underlines the curious pairing of Jay & Yuta.
Released initially as a cassette on the Sydney micro-label Little Winners in limited quantities last year, Jay & Yuta at least have enough business sense to put their record forward for wider release as an LP on the slightly more well-distributed Melbourne label Research Records, with the cassette version sure to fetch a decent price on Discogs down the line. The music brings to mind the imaginative diversity and technological minimalism of experimental pop bands like Systematics and Makers of the Dead Travel Fast or Innocent’s → ↑ → and Essendon Airport. Though crucially Jay & Yuta mostly avoid more macabre and formlessly avant-garde material that was the flip side of many of those groups records, preferring to stick mostly to witty, upbeat but idiosyncratic pop.
Sakana Blitz is probably the most unusual track, based around a meandering synth arpeggio and an oddly timed bass drum pulse with a short, Japanese, spoken-word passage. There’s a familiar element of Fall-esque magical realism in the lyrics, particularly on Mysterious Flaws In The House We Built Ourselves, with Jay leading a tour of inexplicably mundane phenomena paired with a chorus of Yuta's abstractly poetic lyricism. Yuta's capable vocal cadence reminds me of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark more than any underground group while Jay's more unpracticed sprechgesang sounds a lot more like Patrick Gibson of Systematics.
There’s a lot of new and interesting ideas on Condemned Compilations, as well as some genuine hits. At its heart, it’s a reminder that music is supposed to be fun and immediate, not just thoughtlessly consumed but appreciated for all its blemished rarity and unrequited ambition.
- Jaden Gallagher.