- The progress of Emma Kelly’s career as Happy Axe has been one of increasing complexity, until now. Her 2015 full-length This Topia used live looping to forge basic building blocks of sound. Snatches of vocal, saw or violin turned into both harmonic and rhythmic foundations over which she improvised solos -using the same elements- creating edifices of surpassing, lonely sweetness.
Back then her studio additions were noticeable, but a relatively light touch. Come 2018 and her second album, Dream Punching, the studio trickery was more in evidence, but mostly in service of a far greater effort to create fully realised songs; carving out structures from those crystalline sound surfaces. At the end of 2019 I really wasn’t expecting another album, not just yet. I’m not sure Kelly was either, but here it is. Stromlo, named for the mountaintop in Canberra where it was recorded in the sun-bleached remains of an old observatory, appears to have been an intimate little live performance that just happened to go really right.
You can see the whole video of it on Youtube: Kelly sitting in the shade of an old wall, cradling her fiddle, the breeze ruffling her hair; synths, laptop and saw laid out on a little rug. There were a couple of cameras, it’s not a single shot, but there’s still a simplicity, an honesty even, which feels authentic. The video record of it is like proof that it was created in these unpretentious circumstances: using the most basic elements of the Happy Axe toolset in the service of something gently, easily beautiful. As far as I can tell nearly everything was created on location, including the ever-present reverb. A little ambient environmental noise appears to have been added for flavour but other than that there must be barely any post-production at all.
I’ve compared Happy Axe to Julianna Barwick before but the similarites to old Barwick, like the album Nepenthe, flow back stronger here. An ambient music of a ringing, angelic kind that you hear surprisingly little of from others working in the genre. Another artistic echo I noticed swirls in around the eleven minute mark: Kelly creates a vocal loop that brings back wonderful memories of Kirsty Hackshaw’s contribution to Orbital’s Halycon And On And On, to my mind one of the most blissful pieces of dance music ever created. It made me think how easy it would be to go full William Orbit with a remix of Stromlo. I have to say though that if you’re thinking of doing that, don’t; Happy Axe has given us everything we need here, not an iota more is required.
- Chris Cobcroft.