Arrom: Selene | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Even in isolation most of us have had a constant companion during lockdown. The moon, radiant in the sky looks down on our tribulations, her silver face witness to our minuscule lives. For her new LP, Melbourne producer and singer Arrom turns away from personal concerns and returns that luminous gaze. Invoking the Greek goddess of the celestial body, Selene is a record unbound by our physical strictures, travelling mystically between the realms of myth, emotion, nature and humanity. It’s an unusual, even uncanny journey, but that’s what happens when you fall under the sway of the moon.

Arrom’s Melissa Vallence has had a pretty productive pandemic period, despite being locked down in Melbourne. A self-professed non-neurotypical type, one easily overwhelmed by all the colour and noise of the normal world, isolation has provided Vallence all the mental space she’s needed for a creative overflow. Gifted with -almost confronted by- around forty works, Vallence fosicked through the thoughts and emotions of her writing, discovering a kind of divine narrative, or as she put it: “ [a] chronicle of the goddess Selene and her role in creating and destroying the consciousness of those who watch her cross the heavens each night, throughout time.”

There’s a strange connectedness between the lyrical elements of Selene. Just as the mortal is linked to the divine, the goddess ruling our minds, there’s a bleeding of one sense into another that is sometimes like synaesthesia, when Arrom pleads “Taste how I’m trying” and at other times, seems like whole realities are melting into each other: people, gods, worlds, thoughts and feelings blending in phrases like: “The earth breathed in / It pulled the seas in / So many rock pools left behind watered sands and orange skies / Our loves in bloom”.

Vallence describes Selene as ‘lighter’ than her previous work, which…I think is based purely on the fact that she’s dredging up less of her own psychological baggage for public consumption. Whether you find the surreal logic that threads the record together ‘light’ is an open question. Musically it is certainly different from what’s come before. Part of Arrom’s creative effulgence has been all the work she’s done polishing her skills as producer. The previously cavernous soundscapes that haunted her sound are now filled with new beats and styles. Skeletal electro and fuzzy industrial beats rub shoulders with avant garde r’n’b and gothic singer-songwriter fare. Occasionally it sounds a bit like Björk, in the muscular vocalise of Heavenly Rock Cave and sometimes like Gang Gang Dance or maybe fellow Aussie Rebel Yell in propulsive techno cuts like Tore It Apart. I can’t say it ever really sounded pop, the radio-friendly anthems of someone like Grimes are only a distant echo in the sound of Selene.

It’s not easy to sum up Selene - who can hope to adequately describe a goddess? Snippets of mundane experience “I wake up next to you again / I think my head feels funny / The baby's crying again” abut visions of titans - “I saw the moment when Theia melted and gave us oceans that breathe you in” and it culminates in the heat death of the cosmos: “Still, our universe gets colder / So I'll rub your skin to try to keep you warm / You tell me we're all / dying I tell you we were barely even born.” Suffused with eerie visions, bathed in cold light, questioning our place in the vast emptiness, Selene is strange, but that’s the way it is when we converse with the moon.

- Chris Cobcroft.