Setec – Lumen Lake

Jul
29
posted by tommy

If you’ll cast your minds back over the past ten years you’ll recall that somewhere in there was a period that saw folk acts reach critical saturation. It feels like a dream now as our insular Australian world has cast its ears toward an electronic aesthetic that is so rich with sounds and textures as to make the acoustic guitar and vocal chord sound desaturated by comparison. It’s hard to know for sure how we ended up here. It could be that soundcloud provided the platform and that the music was driven by the tech but it could also be the reverse and perhaps soundcloud was just a response to changing tastes. Profit where there’s need, etc etc. A third theory is that we got it so wrong with dubstep that we’re now forever doomed to cycle endlessly through newer and newer electronic music until we correct that terrible mistake with something ideal, a perfect digital sound. During that folk high point I had a favourite artist who went by the name Radical Face (and still does, intermittently) whose take on folk was made richer through his exploration of less traditional percussion. He had a nice voice too. The song below, it reminds me of Radical Face, at least a little bit. It has the same barrage of percussive staccato that pads the spaces and lends a galloping energy to the track.

The folk pigments could be enough to pigeonhole this track within that same hayday of last decade but the cut and looped guitar parts point to a synthetic dynamic that’s more 2014 than 2008. This is the second single from Brittle As Bones, Setec’s debut LP, the first being the rather pretty Water Or Concrete. Now I’ve given the record a bit of a once over and I think I can say, without exaggerating that it is 100% going to be released on August 18th. That’s just a stone cold fact, provided of course that there isn’t a blackout or a Great Catastrophe that prevents the record’s digital release. It would actually be a sad irony in that this would be the perfect record to listen to during a blackout. Now that’s insight. In truth, it’s just a rather wonderful record exclusive of any context. Spend a few dollars on an artist and label that deserves domestic support.

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