- There’s something essentially Australian about cricket-tragic Andrew Tuttle, something genuinely daggy, something about really not being aware of or concerned with cool; preferring history to judge. Like David Boon’s moustache: cringeworthy at a close historical distance, yet more unmistakably necessary with every passing year..
Sunshine, steel strings, synthesisers, with Alexandra Variations AT has made something that would sound good at sunrise over a Cairns canefield, but equally will find a home in international art-music circles. So it makes sense that it’s being released by Brisbane’s home of world-class weirdness: Lawrence English’s powerhouse Room40 label.
Platypus Corridor opens up with field recordings of insect and birdsong layered with swelling slide guitar chords and wistful transistor-radio banjo. In an instant you’re immersed in its world, but then you find yourself alone with a plaintive trumpet and a whipbird.
Tallowwood View settles us in for what will be the majority of the minutes on this release, shimmering soft ripples of strings radiate out of a warm swell of chordal honey. Time thickens and stretches out the sunlight, all smeared glints and muted dazzle.
Tuttle has been one of our front-line proponents in the pastoral music scene for some time, but this new EP shows every tool in his arsenal is sharper this time around. It’s like someone challenged him: be more gentle, be more soft and yielding, find new and better ways to be relaxing, invent novel facets of lightness and warmth.
His technique advances along its own unique vector, experimental yet pursuing an end of the spectrum that seems deeply concerned about beauty, softness, brightness. If you know someone who doesn’t quite ‘get’ ambient music, can’t quite wrap their head around what it’s for, play them this record.
Alexandra Variations could soundtrack a snow-capped morning on Kunyani, a misty pre-dawn on Cooks River, dusk at Semaphore. The world outdoors is infused everywhere on this record.
Chuck Johnson slide guitar?
Even if Andrew Tuttle is a bit of maverick, he is the most chill maverick; the maverick most chill. He’s the kind of maverick who hooked up a banjo to Max MSP -a program better known for glitchy atonal deconstruction of sound- and through the sheer gentleness of his personality persuaded it to make sweet and euphonic washes of sunshine.
Congrats Tutts, you just keep upping the ante on soothing.
- Kieran Ruffles.