Kcin: Bushmaster | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- When Nicholas Meredith released the first of his Sleeplessness & Hopelessness EPs it was described as “overwhelming music for overwhelming times”. The mixture of industrial distortion, intimidating soundscapes, urgent synthwave and a brutal regimen of live drumming certainly fit the bill and, at that time, we had no idea 2019 was just the warm-up round for 2020’s annus horribilis. As if attempting to go blow-for-blow with the increasingly distressing turn of events, Meredith’s rushed out a new mixtape, Bushmaster, under his Kcin moniker, and it feels like an even closer fit for the horrors of the moment. Unspooling the pressurised intensity of the two previous EPs it becomes a grinding soundtrack for the longer haul. This mixtape is also only a harbinger for an album proper: Decade Zero, due later this year. Let’s hope this promise of even more intricately realised musical brutality isn’t a portent of actual horror to come.

I’ve often found it a bit grotesque how human culture borrows from the animal world, using the creatures of the wild as symbols for our own preoccupations, even as we, slowly, grind the natural world out of existence. The name Bushmaster is an excellent example. Originally the title bestowed on one of South America’s more formidable pit vipers, if you do a Google search now you might never realise, because it will return a page full of articles about not just one, but multiple, substantially more lethal items of military kit, filling the arsenals of armed forces around the world. I’m not sure, but I think Kcin’s deployment of the term isn’t referring to Australia’s own multi-million-dollar Light Armoured Vehicle, but, rather, the 20mm chain cannon that is a centerpiece of the US fighting machine and which has been deployed to devastating effect in every conflict they’ve have been involved in since the early ‘80s.

It’s a little difficult to tell exactly what the title refers to from the mixtape's initial murmur of low fidelity radio chatter: American military personnel, spouting jargon, identifying targets and occasionally, casually remarking, “oh, I think I just ran over a body.” These transmission loops are a recurring background, providing a gritty context for the industrial noise, shrieking synths and treated percussion impacts. It amplifies the feeling that Bushmaster is like a soundtrack to a video-game or action movie, but accompanied by the grim sensation that titles like Well It’s Their Fault For Bringing Kids Into A Battle are not just a violent fantasy, but someone’s reality, somewhere in the world. It comes into nasty focus, right at the end of the tape, when Meredith brings the background conversation into the foreground and you hear someone utter with little emotion, “light ‘em up”, heralding thirty seconds of automatic weapons fire and with similar bloodlessness, the concluding statement: “alright, well, we just engaged all eight individuals” and “got a bunch of bodies laying there.”

I hope it doesn't seem melodramatic, but for me it takes on a more alarming quality when you think that, this week, US armed forces alongside increasingly paramilitary police are being deployed against their own civilian populations. All sorts of emotions start to bubble, feelings of hypocrisy and despair needle, as this sort of thing gets closer to your own backyard.

In line with blacked-out media and entertainment sites, it seems a bit inappropriate and unreal to be talking about the qualities of music in this sort of situation. That’s what we’re here to do, however, so: it’s surprising for a collection of instrumental industrial soundscapes, but some of these cuts, like Freedom Capital Exchange and A Predictable Shock featuring the more riveting drum-work and focused synth riffs sound like singles and impressive ones at that. Other moments have more of that soundtrack quality, lacking the ability to grab your attention, especially when noodled out to mixtape length. If nothing else you can at least admit these sections go some way to capturing the feeling of grinding, repetitive hopelessness that is undoubtedly gripping many people as they watch the unfolding of events.

A former Australian Prime Minister accused some people of having a ‘black armband view of history’. I couldn’t help but take that personally and I’ve always felt that a close examination of the world reveals such a view to be all too accurate. Whether I’m being manipulated or not and from Woodie Guthrie to Public Enemy, I’ve always gravitated towards music that soundtracks that feeling. In recent weeks such a sensation has been well-nigh inescapable: in the news, the social media feed, the endless time to dwell on it thanks to joblessness and enforced isolation; it’s a wonder that I can find the strength to still listen to music like this at all. Yet I do. It might be fuel for my rage, it might be something to weep into my beer with or maybe at this point in the long struggle it might just have become habitual; call it what you want and whatever else it might be, it’s very much a soundtrack for our times.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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