ALBUM: It's A Submarine
LABEL:
Cloth EarRELEASE DATE: 2008
It’s A Submarineglazes 70s synthesizer composition with iridescent four-track murk. The
record embraces the frigidness of early electronic music and marries it
with the rote personality/sentimentality of a clipped and
threatening-to-chew four-track recording. Immediate references include
NY performance art group
Excepter and Melbourne analogue fetishists
Maximum Awesome.
Jonathan
Hochman and Matthew Hopkins are both familiar faces in the Sydney
underground: Hochman performs with drone/improv three-piece Holy Balm
and also plays percussion in Sydney-based noise group Stick Stick.
Matthew Hopkins is one half of Naked on the Vague, another half of
Vincent over the Sink, and records solo as Bad Tables and Lamp Puffer.
Together they coalesce the defining sonics of their other projects:
there’s the indeterminate kaleidoscopic fuzz of Hochman’s noise
projects mixed with Hopkins’ peculiar gravitation towards melody thru
murk: a conventional musicality that resolves itself despite scant
means, and prospers despite existing in a proximal musical climate that
shirks melody in favour of texture and figurative noise and static.
Hopkins’ involvement in some of the more song-orientated and ‘poppier’
fringes of Sydney’s DIY scene rubs off on this recording nicely.
Hochman
and Hopkins performed at Pact Theatre on the 21st of June 2008 and
again at La Campana on the 16th of July 2008. The later show saw them
play
It’s A Submarine in its entirety.
