Label: Low Company – LOW16
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: UK
Released: 2023
Genre: Electronic, Pop
Style: Experimental, Abstract, Dub
One last shebang from Low Company as the store’s label-arm finally calls time on its operations with a longgg time in the works solo outing from Aussie underground lynchpin Static Cleaner Lost Reward.
Let’s get the credentials out of the way. Static Cleaner Lost Reward is the solo alias of Tarquin Manek - a key player ingrained within the rich vein of Melbourne / Naarm underground music we’ve all enjoyed for the last 10 years, co-producing works with Carla Dal Forno, YL Hooi, playing in F Ingers (w/ Sam from CS + Kreme) and Kallista Kult whilst dripping out bits as LST, Silzedrek and probably a pile of other stuff we’re not even aware of.
The nine tracks that span Breathing Under Honey tap into the lopsided, bedsit-dwelling, dosed-up anti-pop aesthetic that the late London store / label is synonymous with, tracing it’s roots right back to the domesticated no-budget perma-classic Flaming Tunes from Gareth Williams & Mary Currie via Swell Maps, A.C Marias / Dome / P’o and the likes. Lustrous guitar twang opens up on ‘Stones On The Beach’, laying the elegiac tone that permeates this swan song whilst teeing up ‘Submerging Emergency’ which follows. Imagine Werkbund and T++ smothering a breezy Les Baxter instrumental with contorted dub FX and ping-pong delay and you’re somewhere close, few tracks have caught us as off guard as this in the past few years. From here Tarquin flexes his production muscle, slithering between the heavily syncopated Shake-esque subaquatic jazz noir of Sea Slug Bender, to the dewy-eyed long-distance stare of Brigade Spinnet and thuggish, clenched-jaw dub juggernaught of Tiger Shake.
The foggy interlude Age Old Squall could be mistaken for something off Lee Gamble’s Diversons LP, providing a necessary breathing space for the krautish-squelch of Basic Trouble that feels like Holger Czukay jamming with the Wah Wah wino crew 3 days deep into a studio bender - curtains closed! Whilst Mirage Game seeps with the same sense of detached cool found in all the best Aussie contemporary underground hits. Fuck. It’s all just so good. Similarly with that Yuta Matsumura LP of last year, rare has something managed to yoke together so many of our cherished musical touch-points and it actually still manage to pull it off. Pouring one out for Low Company - 16 releases young and culled too soon, leaving a crater in the underground and in our hearts. No Brainer (Mint / New)
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The sixteenth and final release on Low Company Records is Static Cleaner Lost Reward’s gonzo dub-pop melter Breathing Under Honey. An aquatic ruin zone of echo-distressed, loop-me-crazy song-forms, zonked exotica, slacker-techno and crudely soldered, seasick cyberpunk.
This album - which has been finished for nigh-on three years, sorry - is just the latest expression of Australian artist Tarquin Manek’s powerful and inimitable gift/curse, arriving ten years deep into his career as major player, and enabler, in a now rightly revered seam of the Melbourne/Naarm underground: releasing an array of solo music (LST, Silzedrek, Static Cleaner Lost Reward); co-producing albums by YL Hooi and Carla dal Forno; playing in cult groups Kallista Kult and F ingers (the latter with dal Forno and CS + Kreme’s Sam Karmel); appearing on labels like A Colourful Storm, Blackest Ever Black and Efficient Space.
The nine tracks here showcase both a keen taste for timeless pop umami and a super-evolved grasp of mind-pranging dubwise psychoacoustics; an intermeshing of DIY concrète chaos and supple, locked-on rhythm mechanics that feels not so much futuristic as…extraterrestrial.
Lesser acts have built entire careers on songs less poignant than the semi-improvised, elegiac guitar-synth whirlpool that opens the album (‘Stones On The Beach’). ‘Submerging Emergency’ comes over like a Pet Sounds instrumental that's been heavily irradiated and then held forcibly underwater, growing gills and swimming off to join a shoal of coral-dwelling Ethio jazz(mer-)men. ‘Basic Trouble’ is mutant post-punk dancehall, Manek’s part-dissolved vocal trailing in the wake of a steamrolling, almost Maurizio-esque bassline. ‘Brigade Spinnet’ is shimmering new-age-outlaw noir, Vincent Hanna surveying the sun-bleached rooftops at dawn and dreaming of sleep. “All I am is what I’m going after…”
RIYL: Ferraro/Clarke, Jac Berrocal, Gary War, Peter Gutteridge, Swell Maps, AR Kane, Scritti, Smackos, Peter Gabriel ++
Tracklist
1. Stones On The Beach
2. Submerging Emergency 03:54
3. Sea Slug Bender
4. Fair Game
5. Brigade Spinnet
6. Tiger Shark
7. Age Old Squall
8. Basic Trouble 05:00
9. Mirage Game
