Various Artists: Midnight Meditations

- I’ve spent quite a deal of time reflecting on the effect COVID-19 has had on music. A lot of that effect has been, unsurprisingly, negative. However, it seems like, each week, I’ve been able to find bright points glinting in the blanketing darkness. One such spark in the firmament is less a single star than a constellation. As recording plans go out the window and release dates get pushed back to infinity, artists and labels alike have scrambled to gather up the fragments of music that remain to them - recording in bedrooms, dusting off b-sides and uncovering dormant rarities and releasing them, because it’s better than doing nothing. Sometimes much better, as it turns out. Labels with little, jingling bags of diamonds in the rough have been reviving the artform of the compilation, which had been in danger of going extinct. Label managers have been flexing their mixtaping instincts (you remember mixtapes, before they became what you called a hiphop release when you were too lazy to put out a proper album?) and, in some cases, they've tracked up musical oddities into affecting narratives of these pandemic times. One of the more effective examples of this is Chapter Music’s Midnight Meditations.

The label describes it as “unreleased tracks from Australian-based artists, designed to help listeners through long dark nights of the soul” and it does so by employing a mixed method. Specifically, they've bookended the collection with music gentle and soothing, but in the middle you’ll find a collection of tatterdemalion balladry: gestures of brokenness, stories that pry open the emotional floodgates by inviting us into headspaces that are just as ruined as our own.

So, there’s a kind of honesty here you won’t often find, even in music. Some of the choices are unusual stylistically as well as emotionally too. For the latter, you need look no further than opening cut Nhaya (To See) by Brisbane duo Yirinda featuring Butchulla songman Fred Leone, which marries chanted indigenous song to echoing ambience and a slow oscillation of synths and beats. It’s hypnotically beguiling and quite unlike anything else I can think of. Alex Macfarlane (of Twerps and The Stevens among other things) contributes a slice of his latter day effusion of synth-work, which has a familial similarity to Njhaya but is less ethereal and feels like it’s building energy, as though the compilation is waking up.

What it’s waking up to is Chloe Alison Escott (of Native Cats) banging out grandiose piano chords to accompany a whirl of emotional uncertainty, uneven personal exchanges and not quite devastation, not quite elation, it culminates in the repeated line: “There’s something coming and it’s stranger than death.” In the manner of Tom Waits it’s a gesture of both personal degradation and magnificence at the same time. Sarah Mary Chadwick delivers one of her Bukowski-esque tales of skid-row alcoholism and, as usual it’s some of the most wrenchingly honest songwriting you’ll encounter. Sit Down And Pour is one of the most musically realised of these that I’ve heard - it’s a long way from the cheap and sleazy synth of the old days. It’s a musical centre-piece here too, bleeding the kind of dignity and gravitas that you can only find while scraping along rock bottom. Nearly all of its lyrics will rake the heart strings, but try these for example: “Sometimes my problem is money / And sometimes my problem is wine / But mostly my problem is living and other than that I’m fine.”

I love Ela Stiles' strange mixture of medieval, modal folk and pop anthem in Silence, her sweetly indistinct vocals accompanied by accordion, which, to me, sounds like it’s standing in for a hurdy-gurdy. Like the best of Stiles’ stuff, it is weird and wonderful. Dick Diver’s R. Edwards brings along smooth synth and cheap drum-machine on his electro-lounge crooner with its warm, self-deprecating refrain: “Giving it up, for my career at home.” It pairs well with The Green Child (comprising Mikey Young and Grass Widow’s Raven Mahon) who do a slow and wistful meld of slow ‘60s and ‘80s songcraft for Rats On The Roof. Speaking of wistful, Chapter head-honcho Guy Blackman sounds like melancholy Burt Bacharach set to drum machine in his humorously catty song to Missy: “Missy we both know what it’s like / Not to fit in all those parts we thought we liked / We’re told our shit, but Missy, is that it? / Just build a bridge, get over it.”

The end of Midnight Meditations offers us more ambient for the early hours, beginning with the epic, measured and beautiful chimes of Gallery B’s Nano Bookar. Thomas Hardisty’s Calm Night On Larne is a soft, synthy lullaby and after this whole ‘long dark night of the soul’, we close out with the warbling Magpies of the morning accompanying the warm rhodes and charming lyricism of Greater Expectations by the timeless David Chesworth.

Midnight Meditations, is rich, strange and dreamlike, as things sometimes are, half-hidden in the darkness. If you’re raging against life’s injustices and horrors it rages with you. If you need something warm and gentle to soothe you in their wake, it’s there with a consoling embrace. It’s better than a collection of outsider musical odds and bobs has a right to be and it’s almost a shame to leave it sitting on the nightstand, next to the NyQuil, only for when you wake up in a sweat. Honestly, in this time of both musical and general bereftness, take comfort where you can. Whatever else befalls, Midnight Meditations is here by your side and will stay with you through the long, dark watches of the night.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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