- Some well known Brisbane rockers have shrugged off their guitars and are celebrating a synthetic life instead. hotmagnets continues a prestigious Brisbane, musical lineage. Simon Graydon formerly of fuzzy pop purveyors Sekiden and latterly of the substantially punkier Undead Apes, has, according to him, decide to try and conserve what’s left of his hearing and focus on soothing synth masterpieces, rather than ear-tearing guitar. It might be a pretty clumsy analogy, but if you prized apart the synth and guitar halves of Sekiden and squashed all the guitar power into the Apes, hotmagnets might be what your left with? What is definitely true is this: his entire rocking career, Graydon has been hunting through op shops and online forums for dusty and ancient synths and drum machines -I’m told by a source that he has a backyard studio with literal ‘towers’ of the things- and hotmagnets is the first time in years he’s had a proper opportunity to dust them off and fire them up.
It’s actually clear from the outset that this isn’t simply an electro-pop resurrection of Sekiden. Even with the help of other members like Simon’s partner, Seja Vogel, this has a different feel. Embodying a bit of a paradox, hotmagnets’ debut EP, Omega Chemicals is both more dancefloor-oriented, bass powered, four-to-the-floor and at the same time, quietly meditative, reserved, even hypnotic. It’s not that much of a contradiction really, more of a classic at this point: hotmagnets taps into the continuum of mind-altering beats, producing what I’m told started out as twenty minute hypnoscapes, that Graydon and crew have cut down into slightly more pop sized morsels.
Opener Satellite has a breezy, Stereolab feel, achieved by the propulsive rhythm, pleasantly contrasted with Seja’s dreamy vox. Not quite sure what it’s about, it seems to start out as a tribute to the silver lozenges in the sky as Seja quietly celebrates “Come on Satellite / August in the night / Come on Satellite / All we need tonight!” Then Simon appears to become concerned about the environmental impact, launching into a long coda warning “We can’t go on doing what we have done / We can’t go on thinking nothing is wrong.” Whatever, I think I can, it’s your fault for making the music so pleasantly distracting.
Golden Pulses has exactly what the title promises, great squelches of synth which make it sound like classic electro-boogie, before the style takes a left turn at a Japanese vocal sample into der kosmische musik and forest sounds. In line with the great editing down process hotmagnets has been through, it often feels like several songs are condensed into a single number on Omega Chemicals.
Heavy Metal takes eerie new wave stylings and sutures them to a sample, name-checking ‘80s guitar bands like Aerosmith and Anthrax, precisely the sort of bands whose fans would’ve rather vomited blood than listen to this sort of thing. So, that’s the joke? The song folds out into a krauty electro-funk and once again, the slightly medicated pleasure of the music seems to make concerns like this slightly irrelevant.
There’s more of that hip-moving electro-funk on Sleep Forever Positive Being, which is, again, exactly what the title promises, a pairing of a robot voice reading out a self-affirmation manual in a mechanical whisper: “Heavy negativity bounces off you / You are peace and tranquility / You have complete compatibility with divine love”, paired with a vocoded chorus of blissfully chronic depression: “I want to sleep forever / Don’t want to wake up ever / Please let me sleep forever.”
I think my favourite song on Omega Chemicals may be its most psychedelic, the swirling surrender to a world of software in On And Off. “Living life in binary / Zero zero one for me.” Then it repeats the title ad nauseum, in a long machine-code swan-song, adorned with some tasteful sax licks courtesy of Primitive Motion’s Sandra Selig.
I’m not sure if there is an overarching theme to Omega Chemicals, but if there is, embracing the machine might well be the one. Humans can only fail for so long, as Simon Graydon says, we can’t go on thinking nothing is wrong. Live your life in harmony with hardware, become a conduit for sweetness from towers of circuitry, just like hotmagnets. If this is the soundtrack, calling it a day for humanity may not be all bad.
- Chris Cobcroft.