- Oh bless, there must be something quite wrong with me, but Melbourne’s Uboa takes me to my happy place. It feels especially wrong because as the artist behind it, Xandra Metcalfe, explicitly states “I only take inspiration from things that immediately affect me...various trans issues that do not get airtime in music in particular - trans subcultures, transmisogyny / transphobia, medication, passing, sterilisation, suicide and depression, isolation. A lot of the stuff about mental illness - depression, psychosis, anxiety etc. - comes directly from my experience as being trans in a cisnormative society.” My bad, but catharsis can still be a burning, transcendent pleasure. Just see the name of the label Uboa’s new record is coming out on. There’s no need to be precious about it, either, to quote Metcalfe again: “Nowadays I just use it to scare people, which is always fun.”
So, what sound could possibly encompass all these weighty issues and still be fearsome fun? The Uboa project has covered a reasonable bit of extremely noisy ground since it started, in 2010. Back then Metcalfe was pushing a comparatively slow and sparse doom metal, along with tracts of neo-folk and dark ambient. Contemporarily Uboa, well, actually it still can sound like that listen to the really rather beautiful ambient lilt of the late 2017 split with Slumberkitty, Please Get Home Safe. With that in mind, I suppose much of The Sky May Be is what it sounds like, in the worst possible way, if nobody gets home safe and everything ends badly.
First ‘single’ Thigh High Cat Tights is just insane: you won’t hear a more brutal mixture of experimental noise, digital hardcore and power electronics. The helium-pitch-shifted vocal snatches, crushing guitars and ear-drum destroying samples and effects are either a tour de force or a self-indulgent nightmare, depending on your perspective. Beyond being simply brutalising it’s technically impressive as well. I’m reminded of what drew me to such luminaries as Merzbow and Pharmakon.
If you’re not into that then, sadly, I’m sure you won’t stick around for the rest of the EP, but, even here at her most excoriating, Uboa finds beauty. Leading into the EP’s final vignette is the transformative I Can’t Love Anymore, threading emotional dysfunction with ironic sweetness, this is an ambient creation of multilayered vocals that is more like Julianna Barwick or Jenny Hval than doom.
The two extremes of Uboa’s inspiration are slowly folded back into each other with the help of a lot of found object percussion and sampling across the four tracks that compose subdivided title-track, The Sky May Be. If you wanted a ‘proof of concept’ the final chapter, The Sky May Be (Zenith) plays both ends of the spectrum with an alarmingly bipolar ability to flip between what sounds like a poorly tuned, but still pretty koto and Metcalfe screaming like a banshee. Clearly and absolutely not for everyone. If you are musically adventurous, Uboa is doing really great things in Australian noise. Be brave, make the bleeding brain grow and find out what.
- Chris Cobcroft.