- Female Wizard aka DJ Brooke Powers aka Alexander Powers is that rare thing, a high profile figure in the world of underground Australian dance. They star at their many club nights, they take high profile slots at festivals and they’re more than happy to talk on the record, loquacious even, about their career, queer politics and what the music’s all about. The advent of Messy-Podge-Mania, their label debut for Anterograde could make it seem like they’re a little bored with being ‘known’, being understood. Perhaps it’s time to take things back to the undulating shadows of the underground, to question just what it is you think you know, about Female Wizard.
There’s a stark cutoff between the ever-loving garage-house that was the stuff of Brooke Powers’ prowess and the surreal, twisted world of -what might be called- techno inhabited by Female Wizard. I don’t know quite when it happened, sometime in the last three years, maybe when Genesis P. Orridge started appearing in their DJ mixes. Certainly you can find some earlier Female Wizard mixes that are reliably housey, but, boy, Messy-Podge-Mania, we are not in Kansas anymore.
It bucks the usual trend of musicians who give in to comfortable, flabby sounds as they progress, but I suppose it wouldn’t otherwise be that noteworthy, if it weren’t that Female Wizard’s experiments are more interesting than most and in a number of ways. The rhythms are, more often than not, fever-dream recreations of the dancefloor experience. Opener, Cleansing, sounds like its speeding beats were stitched together by a malfunctioning sequencer, or all one-hundred-thousand of them were rustically (and inexpertly) handcrafted. It approaches being dance music, but with an unnerving lack of regularity that would (and does) alarm dancefloor denizens.
There’s a wide array of sounds that draw from a broad palette of styles: industrial, dance, field-recording and noise. The results are nearly always uncanny. Returning to Cleansing, the initial spray of beats sounds like it might be raining musical spoons, or an avalanche of tap-dancers, before a dub made of whale-song comes bubbling up through the mix. The hybridisation of artificial and organic, the musical and found-sound will likely have your imagination itching a good portion of the time - what exactly am I hearing here? The cut codas out with what might be electronic tablas and the howl of a mechanical bird.
As Magic Madness Sadness progressed through mobile phone vibrations, glittering trap hi-hats atop offbeat, altered-toms and backed by electronic insect chirups, I realised that there’s something very life affirming about Female Wizard’s oeuvre. Often the mutant samples just make you feel like you’re in a world of vibrantly living creatures, but, even on a number like Vernacular Gender which is all industrial evacuation alarms and then traffic jams, there’s still an undeniable warmth. Perhaps the borrowed sounds reference the world around us, or perhaps it’s just the endless, particoloured variation is the very opposite of what you expect given where synthetic electro started.
The infinite looping of dance, even in these seven-minute slabs, is absent, as Alexander matches the manic beating of synthetic moth wings with muted calls from other clockwork animals and middle-eastern ney melodies on Pagan Youtube. One of the few indulgences in repetition here is the layered canon that builds to a maximalist explosion of sound to end the track.
Perhaps just to prove they still know what a dancefloor is, Messy-Podge-Mania’s last cut proper is Ennio and it takes a spirited hardcore lap around the discotheque, even as it fiddles incorrigibly with texture and timbre across most of its length. Portland experimentalists MSHR throw in a remix of Magic Sadness Sadness to give you your money’s worth. It’s notably less avant-garde than FW, beat-wise, but gives the original an eye-poppingly squelchy treatment, sounding like a troupe of chorusing space-apes: very much in the spirit of the rest of the record.
Messy-Podge-Mania lives in a liminal space between the worlds of dance, soundscaping and industrial music. I know Female Wizard was aiming to push boundaries, but I think, more specifically, this confusion of things may be an expression of Alexander’s own multiple, colliding identities; am I reading too much into it? Things which are in flux, that don’t fit our preexisting mental boxes always face challenges. Having read a few less than positive social-media responses to FW’s experimental tip, I was wondering if this record would have a tough time finding its place in the world. Then I remembered that this kind of jolt to the system is one of the things that Female Wizard really wants to deliver: a reminder that your little mental boxes aren’t doing justice to all the things there are. It may thin out the dancefloor a bit, but some of those who remain will tumble to the realisation that there’s more to the culture than just pounding four-to-the-floor. For Messy-Podge-Mania that’s mission accomplished.
- Chris Cobcroft.