- Since their early collaborations under the umbrella of pioneering prat culture label cum home recording studio M-Squared, Dru Johnson-Jones and Mitch Jones have had a blurred hand throughout each other’s creative and personal lives, for nearly forty years. A trailblazing example of Australia’s working class avant-garde, Mitch ran the label closely with Michael Tee where they embraced the sinister and the poetic together or apart forging enduring collaborations in Scattered Order, and through working with Dru’s abstract pop duo Height/Dismay with the late, great Patrick Gibson.
Still creating in sync, both debuted their latest solo monikers last year with Mitch’s The little hand of the faithful releasing the album Is With You on Melbourne’s Psychic Hysteria and Dru’s Skipism releasing the EP air from here on American label Æscape Sounds. Together they return to Psychic Hysteria with a with a pair of “companion” albums, respectively titled Quiet // Disquiet.
Skipism’s Quiet and TLHOTF’s Disquiet are two distinct albums, each approaching nearly a full hour in length. Both were made with the assistance of the other and approach electronic music with a broad interest, taking inspiration from different eras of music from the jazz through proto-electronic musique concrete to modern styles of electronic dance music. They gesture towards a kind of personal and cultural nostalgia, but the two albums stand as markedly individual works.
Quiet tends towards the realm of abstracted and personalised sounds. A highlight is Where We Are, which presents a vocal performance from Dru accompanied by a cycling of synth groans and whispering samples which build to an apocalyptic end. It is removed from that pervasive sense of nostalgia and places the work in an expressive present with a sincerely affecting, doomy soundscape.
Many of the tracks feel like prolonged sound collages, reminiscent of the electro-acoustic works of synthesized sound pioneer Tristram Cary. Artificially muted rhythms are layered with delay and reverb, contrasting with acoustic instrumentation and field recordings. Under A Lurgie is a jagged cut up with strong elements of breakbeat music. Snappy, brushed drum samples and pizzicato strings on Leon Meringue blend with disconcerting vocal samples and light synth plucks to create the sense of a honky-tonk bar at the edges of time. Other tracks like Rounded Corners firmly ride the sweet spot on the line between trip-hop instrumental and electro-acoustic experiment, which is expanded with a gesture towards electro swing on It's Just The Light That's Upside Down.
Disquiet foregrounds an unpredictable and brutish style of instrumentation and sampling. At times tracks are reminiscent of some of Coil’s more percussion driven outings, Psychic TV’s acid-house records or Oneohtrix Pointnever’s emotive, sample-based mashups. Resonant synth lines and syncopated four-to-the-floor dance beats mesh with distorted guitar and samples of telephone rings and tyre burnouts on Is That You Lonely? While more post-punk beat driven tracks like A More Perfect Kind Of Escape bring to mind recent Scattered Order. It has plenty of formless and nostalgic outings like those on Quiet, with a greater emphasis on samples that sound distinctly derived from bygone media. No Room For Muddle, for instance, sounds like the turning of an AM dial over a chorus of synthesizer groans.
Both Quite and Disquiet point towards an ineffable realm of experience through a joyful play of styles and sounds from time past, often blurring the distinction between the two. They sit harmoniously side by side, and the release feels like a celebration of the self and a continued appreciation for each others differences, throughout an enduring partnership and collaboration.
- Jaden Gallagher.