FREE CHOICE / MENTAL POWERS split 7”

Free Choice is Jarrod Zlatic of Fabulous Diamonds solo project. In a live setting it’s more of Terry Riley, Harmonia like trance-inducing, endless repetition type thing but on his side of this 7” he’s condensed those sounds into a hit single! Cruising down the autobahn, sunglasses on, wind in your hair etc. I don’t know anything about Mental Powers but they do that bizzaro post-punk free-folk thing with enough ideas and energy to make it really enjoyable. Definitely not zany hippy dribble, another great band from Perth.

I'm writing this 40,000 feet in the air but curiously, my subject matter lies at the other end of the altitudinal end - strictly underground in fact - both literally and figuratively. Yes, it was Friday night, the sun had sunk into its ocean horizon like a fiery ship, and in its dark damp wake a peppering of people strode purposefully past the lights of Fremantle's main street. Soon they'd reached it - a stairwell, a beshadowed door, and the glowing entrance to a subterranean cavern of wonders unknown.

Its walls were rocky and rough, punctuated by mysterious artworks and beer taps, one's path lit only by drooping stalactites of fairy lights; and nestled in an alcove was the Silver Bulletin, a mythical creature known for its distinctive call. Known to mortal men as Camryn Rothenbury, he cast strains of near-pained vocals and frank lyricism over twangelic nylon-string guitar which, while robustly delivered, threatenened to fragment and disintegrate into the cosmos at any moment. It's strangely reminiscent of post-Floyd Syd Barret; lyrics both poetic and awkwardly blunt spun with a sleepy conviction over strummed progressions which are at once amateurish, out of tune, and perfectly executed.

Tailing the stirling silver of Mr. Rothenbury were a troupe of master hypnotists known to cave-dwellers as Mental Powers. Eschewing the stage in favour of a floorward psychedelic coroboree with men and instruments littered about the place, they slithered into their entrancing tunnel of math rock percussion grooves, subtly delicious riffery, wailing, half-pawpaw-shaped-metal-boat-thing-hitting and recorder tooting. What elevates Mental Powers above so many shambolic experimental jam-bands is that instead of brewing in a pool of intoxicated aimlessness, their jams have a depth, a complexity, and a direction - wild explorations gradually reveal themselves to be bound by ingenious arrangements, and swell and ebb into a magnificent four-dimensional shape. Every Mental Powers show improves upon the last - the addition of Steve of Mink Mussel Creek/Whalehammer on four-and-six-string certainly hasn't hurt - they are without a doubt one of the most impressive and exciting experimental bunches around.

SPLASH! Lakes, the one-man outfit with a deceptively plural name, dove into his dark underground pool, a rust-coloured slush gritty with fuzz and overflowing with clumps of bobbing wooden doof. 'Pleasant' is not an adjective that should be seen within a twenty mile radius of Lakes. The man takes guitar-and-drum-machine sonic sandpaper to your brain and scrapes it all about whilst spitting a low sort of Johnny Rotten-meets-Snowman vocal into your eyeballs, twisted dirgey folk melodies that evoke the distant deathly shanties of ghost-skeleton convicts dragging their ball and chain through a nautical nightmare. Lakes' latest release will make a great stocking filler this christmas for great-aunt Gladys, presuming you really want to give great-aunt Gladys an aneurism. Lakes is nevertheless brilliant at what he does - for the most part- there was a certain apathy to the performance which occasionally rendered his noisemaking more unconvincing than engaging.

But tonight's subterranean stars were Pink Reason, fresh out of Minnesota and tonight consisting of Kevin DeBroux (PR's only permanent member) Matt Whitehurst (Psychedelic Horseshit) and Ryan Jewell (Jandek). In notoriously unpredictable fashion, they set off first into a simple acoustic tune before tumbling into a quasi-latino surf-guitar jam and then a wave of freakish noise which would mount into a tumultuous magenta storm, louder and fiercer than the wet squall now raging outside above ground, before subsiding again to a soft tranquil trickle. Not only was the setlist varied, but the individual songs warped, contorted, reimagined, so as to hardly resemble the original versions - 2 minute-ish garage-punk thrashabout 'Borrowed Time' was transformed into an extended, semiacoustic, ultra-slowed epic, before dissolving into more abstract noise. Drummer Jewell was perhaps the real highlight, manipulating his kit in endless obscure ways and transforming the set's percussive element into a bewildering soundscape into its own right, a dazzling mixture of dexterity, stamina and imagination. DeBroux extracted waterfalls of crumbling fuzzy organ throughout the set's last piece, a hypnotic trudging cyclical riff, brought to a head and exploding as an instrumental geyser, a fittingly ambigous end to the Pink Reason's disorienting psychedelic patchwork. The cozy confines of the Norfolk Basement had presented us with a night of the underground indeed, but one that placed us upon its dark shoulders and lifted us into the clouds, swirling and sparking with a phantasmagoric assortment of sounds, wrapping us in its pink cotton haze of curiosity until long after the sunship had risen to sail aloft another day.

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