Lite Fails: The End Of The World Has Already Happened

- “I was safe but restless in Brisbane”, said the man behind Lite Fails; time to create some ambient music, then! Composer, historian and archival explorer Henry Reese has been quite an agile explorer of Australia’s early, recorded audio heritage. His work to date, as far as I’m aware, has been more of a historical excavation, rather than composition: digging up both the written records and the forgotten shellac that contains the earliest echoes of an audible Australia. I’ve listened to his podcast about Amy Williams, a Melbourne woman who fell on hard times in the early days of the 20th century and ‘busked’, playing records on a tinny grammophone on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne. It’s a deeply evocative story, both in a surprisingly engaging, nostalgic recollection of the ‘20s -which were less roaring for some- and a more needling tale of the plight of a woman left with very little, but music. Reese links all this to the broader story and social history of homelessness in Australia, which is, sadly, still very much relevant today.

For his own musical output, as Lite Fails, Reese has taken on another, even more pressing cause: the fires that are surging across the Australian countryside. According to Reese, fire has been a surprisingly regular motif in the early recordings found in Australia. In his own words: “Researching the cultural history of sound recording, I am constantly struck by the comparisons that early Australian listeners made between fire and the surface noise of phonograph cylinder records. In the 1890s and 1900s, the pops, crackles and imperfections of the new medium struck early listeners as similar to the daily presence of fire, heat and power.” Now he brings back these sounds, like forgotten reminders of that power, almost like harbingers of doom. “Tamed fire and tamed sound were hallmarks of progress and modernity. But now the land roars like a freight train and the people can't breathe.”

It’s a reasonably novel approach to creating ambient music: these old, little remembered archival finds of orchestral recordings, comedy sketches and vaudeville tunes, slowed down and warped into strange soundscapes. The huge and ominous flow that is transformed out of the piece The Battle Of Manilla is now an eerie, sometimes glacially smooth, sometimes distorted and crackling opening to this collection. Incidentally, often the names of the pieces that have been mutated, as in this case, are as exciting to the imagination as anything else.

Reese also folds in field recordings, like the flowing water you’ll hear on the somewhat disturbingly titled (due to its multiple possible meanings) Farewell To Springbrook, running up against the ambient ice created from Rescued From The Flames. These discrete elements sometimes seem abrasive, like they haven’t been as fully sutured together as the music requires.

The epic, soaring gale that is Jigsaw For A Continent reminds me of some of the dusty soundtrack that Toto and Brian Eno cobbled together for Dune, and indeed there are multiple echoes of the eerier end of David Lynch soundtracks across The End Of The World Has Already Happened. The song of the wind gets meshed to the sound of what must be cicadas, slowly hollowed out into a disturbing, mechanical simulacra, as the background phases wildly. The track is long enough that we get a second theme in a sentimental burst of organ that slowly becomes stranger as Reese layers the track on top of itself, causing weird tonalities to ooze forth. I think this method and certainly the title of the track reference the larger intellectual project that Reese is engaged in. A piecing together of what Australia is -or could be- from the great, disparate collection of its sounds. It’s a huge undertaking, much bigger than even the most epic outpourings of this record and you can read about it at length in the notes appended to its release on Bandcamp.

The number Fire Season takes a slightly different approach to the ambience, producing a ghostly but carnivalesque organ loop that is, again, one of the most Lynchian moments here. The EP finishes with something different again in Dreamland. It harnesses male vocal parts and slathers them with reverb until it sounds like plainchant in an enormous cathedral. The addition of native bird calls and the sounds of the bush are quite arresting, when you imagine the church opening out into that environment. Perhaps this vignette is some kind of prayer, searching to bring human worship and a reverence for nature together: a new way to think of the world, if we’re going to save it from the flames.

The End Of The World Has Already Happened is a weird but highly evocative record. Its background ambitions, the intellectual project its attached to and all the many ancient fragments of Australian sound are what makes it so engaging, as much or more than the music itself. Lite Fails, despite the name, is like a vital new wellspring, the creation of a redeeming new headspace, because it’s clear we need to rethink what this country, this land is, if we’re going to survive in it.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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