- Western Australia has always been home to some of the nation’s stranger sounds. Psychedelic licks and left-field electronica that refuses to follow the same beat as the rest of the world: these things keep bubbling up and -I’m sure I don’t need to tell you- have a tendency to go big. One such oddity which has slowly but surely been making its way into the ears of tastemakers around the world, is Erasers. The synth-kraut-psych-drone duo of Rebecca Orchard and Rupert Thomas has unassumingly learned every aspect of the trade over the years and now, much less unassumingly, have just released two mini-albums back to back. It seems like it might be time to turn and face this particular strangeness.
The droning, synthesised strains of a certain sort of der kosmische musik, is a sound just exclusive enough to be immediately evocative of the other deep space travellers who do this kind of thing; almost as evocative as the sound is itself. The meeting of opposites -buzzing, hypnotic, ambient synth drone that’s just about shapeless, stretched across a grid of tightly looped, motorik, krautrock beats- has an inexplicably powerful effect. It's as though you’re sitting, lotus-style, in the field between two powerful magnets of opposite polarity. Bands that follow this modus operandi always seem to be more than a little mystical, inviting you to step out of your own mundane world and into some other place altogether. That nordic twilight cult Goat are an example, so too are the psychedelic, astral-travellers Moon Duo or another of Australia’s own navigators of the feverish murk, Fabulous Diamonds. Erasers made me want to travel back across time and space to bask in the glow of all these ethereal beacons once more. In doing so I realised that they (Erasers) bear a truly striking resemblance to Wisconsin duo Peaking Lights, at least as they sounded a decade back, around the time when a lot of the bands mentioned here were first taking off.
I don’t mean to call Erasers derivative and Peaking Lights certainly don’t sound like that any more - which I think is their loss. Rather I’m trying to say that they’ve stuck with something good. I haven’t been able to hear the early CD-Rs Erasers put out, but there’s a surprising consistency between their more recent records. In fact I was listening to Wandering from Pulse Points and then flicked over to Returning Home from 2015’s Stem Together and realised I couldn’t actually tell the difference. The more I harp on this the more it’s going to sound like I’m being rude, but, really, there’s a hunger for this specific strange sound, one which the international standing of Erasers and the various US labels like FireTalk and Solid Melts lining up to release their material attests to. If that doesn’t convince you by the way, Erasers also opened nationally for Methyl Ethel not that long ago, which actually does my head in, a little.
Erasers are also, in the last instance, their own thing. The combination of deliberately DIY musicianship in the cheap drum-machine and rustic improv and -unlike many of their co-travellers- production that is more than a little hifi (helped along by a mastering job from Lawrence English this time round), make the duo stand out from the crowd. Even more obviously, Rebecca Orchard’s sonorous voice is often commented upon. It has a white timbre and she strikes hard with it. I also think that, multitracked just a couple more times it would sound very much like Karin Dreijer.
It’s always a little difficult to predict where something as refreshingly weird as Erasers will end up. At one and the same time they appear to be on a trajectory into the past and the future, completely absorbed in their own musical niche and making waves across the world. About all I can say with certainty is that the unlikely advent of crossing paths with them on this wide, cosmic plane, has been a happy one for me.
- Chris Cobcroft.