Tony Dale

KM kicks things off

It seems like just last week we were putting the finishing touches on our "Best of 06" columns, yet here we are again trying to make sense of another four seasons of musical output. In retrospect, it seems like I didn't really come across a lot of new music that was breathtakingly new this year, but I did hear plenty of stuff that pleased my ears just fine. Like my friend Tony Dale (below), I'll call it a year of consolidation and expansion rather than revolutionary advance, but I don't think that's a bad thing at all; refining and extending are worthwhile steps that easily can be forgotten in the midst of today's constant mania for novelty.

Back for more, with Tony Dale (Lee follows below)

This is the time of year I like to call "nailing smoke to a wall time". With the proliferation of releases on CD and LP on major and minor labels, and the explosion of artifacts issued by the handmade CD-R underground, chances of actually hearing more than an infinitesimal sample of what's going on are slim, and add to that the increasing impact of download only releases and you've got an exercise on par with sorting out the shenanigans of quantum particles. Nonetheless, here is a selection of ten releases that stayed with me more than briefly - works that in effect became invisible co-travelers in the hurtling rail cart that was my passage through 2006.

Irishman Dave Colohan is a central figure in the United Bible Student movement, his voice unmistakable, his presence always felt. When you get your hands on an Agitated Radio Pilot release (they can be elusive) and wrap your ears around its melancholy pleasures, it's clear that the music of ARP is a conduit for Colohan's most personal thoughts and feelings, which are presented unfiltered (mostly) by the collaborative imperatives of other familial projects like United Bible Studies and Magickal Folk of the Faraway Tree. When seven ARP releases came across my desk in a quite short space of time, the opportunity to round 'em up and make some kind of sense of the project's progress seemed too good to pass up. For the sake of completeness Your Turn to Go It Alone, which was received somewhat earlier (though still in 2006), is included.

A definition first -"jumbuck" is Australian slang for a sheep, and more specifically a young 'un (i.e. probably a lamb). The term has mystified millions and is best known from Banjo Paterson's use of it in "Waltzing Matilda". Its etymology is equally mystifying. It is possibly from an Austrlaian Aboriginal language, or perhaps an Aboriginal alteration of an English phrase like "jump up". Some suggested etymologies are a stretch. In 1896 a writer in local period journal The Bulletin suggested:

The word ‘jumbuck' for sheep appears originally as jimba, jombock, dambock, and dumbog. In each case it meant the white mist preceding a shower, to which a flock of sheep bore a strong resemblance. It seemed the only thing the aboriginal imagination could compare it to.

Enough of the sophistry anyways, we're here to cook. For this one, you'll need a camp fire with some good steady coals and a sturdy, preferably heavy duty cast iron (doubles-as-weapon grade) frying pan.

At a subterranean level below the much-hyped press darlings of the “freak-folk” - God, I hate that label - movement, is a network of genuinely intriguing noise-makers that are the true carriers of the flag raised by the hippie-tribal-psychedelic folk movement of the late 60s. Whether it be the fragile experiments on Jeweled Antler, the kaleidoscopic fragmenting of the apartment folk scene started by Tower Recordings, the myriad of projects of Foxglove and Digitalis, or the dynamically interchanging Finnish free music scene centred on Fonal Records, these are collectives not content to pastiche hippie folk or be quirkily bohemian. Rather the nodes in this network draw in influences as far-ranging as free jazz, noise, industrial and found sound, as well as the high quality home-brew technology of the CD-R format, to create a new topography of the underground. Add the allure of limited editions with hand-made packaging, and the use of the Internet as a means of distribution, and you have an immersive, addictive playground for artists and fans alike. Two of the more fascinating (and least-hyped) collectives are the United Bible Studies crew out of Ireland (see the recent Deep Water profile), and the group of artists orbiting around Michael Donnelly’s “Musicyourmindwillloveyou” imprint, based in the Australian country town of Kyogle, which nestles in rain-forest country near the border between the states of New South Wales and Queensland.

I’ve gone all survivalist for this menu, because sometimes you just don’t know when you are going to be left behind by your ride, captured by aliens and deposited in the middle of the outback, or escaped from a backpacker-killing psychopath (Wolf Creek is based on fact, you know). You may not have all of the ingredients below, but hey, imagination and artistic license. Or whatever.

Ingredients

• Kangaroo leg (roadkill of course)
• Worcestershire Sauce
• Garlic cloves
• Mixed herbs
• Half a cup of cooking fat (kangaroo has a really low natural fat content)
• Bottle of Aussie Shiraz
• Cup of water

Directions

Make incisions into leg in three or four places (the Roo’s leg of course, not yours), and pack with cloves of garlic down near the bone.

It’s difficult to imagine a more unlikely place for a fertile “head music” scene to emerge than South Africa in the late 60s. With racism and nationalism conjuring a cloud over social and artistic expression in a land isolated from the main stream of Western culture and commerce, it must have seemed that precious stones and metal were all the expedient West wanted from them. But natural forces respect none of these constraints, and the Summer of Love was a force of nature, a vibration that shook the world, with few places untouched by its promise of a passageway through the cosmic eye — Love, Peace and Understanding a possibility if you made the jump. A fertile sub-culture in South Africa did make the jump, creating a unique body of recorded psychedelia and progressive rock. But unlike that other Great Southern Land, Australia, not much escaped to the rest of the world. Unsupported at home, and unable to export their thing, the South Africa head bands generally winked briefly into existence, released what they could, and were gone. Almost.