Buoyant indie-pop with a very sizable slice afro-pop fusion, it’s Melbourne six-piece Broadway Sounds whose music funnily includes zero sounds that one might actually associate with broadway. Not quite sure why there’s eight people in the photo but I can tell you with 100% certainty that it says six people on the soundcloud bio. In truth the first song I’ve included below ‘Booby Trap’ isn’t actually that indicative of their long term sound. The first Wildflowers EP has none of the stuttered, chant heavy elements of ‘Booby Trap’ but is all smooth synths and sax parts. Even ‘The Last Detail’ (also below) from the more recent EP of the same name is padded with strings and pipes that make for a more languid, reclined listen that incites comparison to Kings of Convenience in its Mediterraneanisms. The soundcloud is a real mixbag but if you’re a fan of #music then you might #like #it. There’s a pretty “cool fun” video for ‘Booby Trap’ too.

I have a friend named Si. What? What’s Si short for? Geez, I don’t actually know. I’ve always assumed Siclops but then I’ve never asked. Let me get back to you. As well as being a generally likeable cat and being one of the few people who can functionally wear a beige trenchcoat, Si has a third merit; He runs a boutique agency called Wondercore Island.

Wondercore manage all the good bands and none of the bad ones. Wondercore also put out irregular mixtapes, irregular in that they contain wonderfully queuereighted collections of odd, abstract Australian music that sits on a soul/fusion/jazz tip. It’s not a populous scene but it’s one that Wondercore firmly presides over with a technicolour scepter and a communal spirit. Also, it’s irregular in that the space of time between each release is not consistent etc.

Yesterday was a mixtape day and so I’ve prepared for you a few of my choice cuts from Wondercore Island #3. Involve yaself.

First off, imagine me listening to a mixtape with an unreleased Oscar Key Sung track on it and then opting not to write about it. You can’t, can you? Thus, Oscar Key Sung ‘Hollow Grams’, a reworking of his ‘Holograms EP’ title track. The whole thing has been reduced to some core sounds and structures with the light addition of shattering glass sampled toward the end of the piece. His remix game is strong and even moreso when applied to his own gear.

Hiatus Kaiyote are here flipped by Brooklyn duo The Stuyvesants and rhymed over by one of Australian hip-hop’s most radiant hopes, Remi Kolawole. The verse is usual braggadocio fare fused with Hiatus praise (“Let me present Nai Palm from Hiatus, yeah the greatest, c’mon”) but it rolls nicely across the reimagined HK beat.

The tape’s more produced tracks are punctuated by a few simpler instrumental moments. There’s a very, very pretty piano track Hiatus’ resident wizard Simon Mavin and there’s this one from Jamil Alexandros Zacharia (who?), a soundscape composed of guitar plucks, strums, wobbles and twangs over some more distant, deeper sounds. More plz.

Hear and download the whole Wondercore Island #3 Mixtape for free right here.

In December 2013, Yon Yonson dropped the best EP of 2014. Hypomantra is eight tracks of exploratory, experimental pop weirdness and naturally I got all tangled about it and wrote some really rather gushing things over at Mess + Noise. In April, and here’s where it gets good, I doctored some images of the band members into compromising situations and used these images to blackmail the two (sometimes three) piece into our very first live session and thus, Sound Doctrine Show & Tell was born. YonYon invited us round to Rick’s backyard where they played the title track from their EP while Matt Davis filmed and Joe Hardy recorded and the end result is, I think, rather wonderful.

So, without further ado,
Sound Doctrine Show & Tell Presents
Yon Yonson – Hypomantra

Yep, the ol’ blog’s been pretty active lately. I’ve been told by a few people that it’s actually been too active. Those people are dead wrong and more than that, they’re repugnant humans. I think it’s been right on point and all the more impressive that I’ve managed it amid the other things I’ve had on. Sure I’m navigating my usual 9-5 but I also go out of my way to keep a few separate endeavours on the bubble. Most notably I’ve been playing an IOS game called Dragon Coins this past fortnight which is more time expensive than you might think, mostly because this damn Midasbane won’t evolve into a full blown Grotslang without more coins. Always more coins. Not made up names by the way, Dragon Coins doesn’t work in half measures, you live by the coin or you die by the coin.

Yet, somehow, here I am again with more Sydney music for your dumb ears that don’t even deserve it. I offer forth a beat constructor named Jonathan Baker but henceforth we’ll refer to him by his music pseudonym Anatole. His music almost feels mathematical in its precision as if the introduction and removal of each track’s various elements is the outcome of a definite algorithm. The timing demonstrated across these sonic ins and outs is straight meticulous and the elements themselves are delightfully crisp from the perfectly sharp string manipulations in ‘Westbrook’ to the rattle and crunch found littered throughout ‘Undercurrent’. Anatole has a fantastic ear for textures, pairing the thin sounds in ‘Undercurrent’ with the lush warm piano overtones to make a piece of singular depth and beauty.

He’s dropped a few singles over the last twelve months but only truly blooded himself with his Westbrook EP this May. It came to me the same way everything on Sound Doctrine does, through a drug fueled internet dreamquest / Tim Shiel’s extensive bandcamp orienteering and hopefully it sits with you as well as it has for me. Let the weekend commence.

New Seekae. Do we need a backstory? Do we need incentive? No & no. It sounds like what I always imagined I’lls might sound like with some bonus BPM points. In years to come I’ll tell my grandchildren that I was the fourth stream on the second single from the third Seekae record. Noone can take that away from me.