- If you thought that Crooked River, a solo record by the quietly prolific, even ubiquitous Australian composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist, Richard Pleasance was a lockdown record -because what record isn’t these days- I actually think you’d be a bit mistaken.
It’s more the case that after putting nine series worth of soundtracks for Aussie prison drama Wentworth to bed, the man found himself in his home studio, high up in the ranges of country Victoria and at a bit of a loose end. I’m not going to diminish anyone’s pandemic experience, especially someone from Victoria, but Pleasance -who, I note, still managed not that long ago, to drive all the way into town and do a show with Augie March (one of the many iconic Aussie artists he’s produced)- seems to have found the experience more serene than some.
I think it has a bit to do with the fact that long before our present, straitened circumstances, after pulling the plug on his early career playing in bands like Boom Crash Opera, Pleasance voluntarily removed himself from all the hustle and bustle of the big smoke, getting artists to come to him, or failing that, just doing things exactly as he pleased and often, by himself. As he put it in an interview with The Totality: "I live in the bush so sometimes it's much more expedient for me to do it myself than hire someone - I've got the time to get it right." I believe this is called ‘splendid isolation’, quite different from the normal sort.
From this vantage Pleasance has composed and performed film scores for the likes of Kenny and, as we know, created TV soundtracks for Wentworth as well as Sea Change and others. Beyond that he also produces and plays with icons like Archie Roach and Paul Kelly and he still finds time to indulge numerous family projects, including playing for his wife Michelle’s burlesque act, Cherry Flambe. They also appear as Pleasantville, who’re apparently hard at work creating a slew of murder ballads. I’ve heard one, a paean to the serial-killer Carl Starkweather and, unwholesomely, it makes me keen to hear more.
What we’re actually here to talk about though is his new album, Crooked River, a song-cycle in honour of the river of that name, which snakes its way through the Victorian Alps and the places Pleasance grew up. It is, in some ways, an even more family-centric affair than any of his others, with artwork courtesy of his wife and daughter as well as music videos from his sons. The music, too, is a collaboration with another son, Alfie, who plays sax and drums, accompanying Richard’s often haunting guitar licks.
By turns ambient and jazzy, Crooked River evokes both the bucolic peace of the flowing waters and the unsettlingly gothic associations the Australian psyche attaches to the wide expanses of our wilderness. You can hear both moods in the same cut on the title track, opening the record. The encroaching presence of humanity is here as well and makes for some dark and dingy jazz and blues, used to the same kind of effect Tom Waits achieves; you can hear it on a number like Can’t Stop Progress. More often than not, however, I hear the river itself, its endless movement, its eddies and counter-currents, expressed in building canons and polyrhythms. It’s definitely soundtrack music, but hypnotically evocative rather than sleep-inducing.
I don’t know if anyone ever created a soundtrack that went on to inspire a TV series, but if someone wants to send Aaron Pederson or Ioan Griffudd out to backwoods Victoria to investigate crimes, well, we know what it should sound like. For Richard Pleasance, Crooked River, is just another episode in the catalogue of one of Australia’s most quietly successful musicians, one that, like the river it depicts, possesses a subtle but undeniable power, for those who come across it in their travels.
- Chris Cobcroft.