Today’s offering comes courtesy of Fatshaudi and Luca Rain, a partnership formed around this two-track release Dance All Day / Make Believe. It’s not really an a-side/b-side type affair since both tracks are equally beautiful in their varying intensities but Dance All Day seems like the focus track, so that’s where I’d direct you first off. You can have them both embedded her though, I’m santa today and you are my devoted acolytes, receiving each of my presents as if a sacred . I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t really understand how Christmas works, but I think I’m close.

I feel like this is the sort of record that’d make fans out of some of my favourites like Lonelyspeck or Cookii. I wonder if some of Lonelyspeck’s production palette has bled through the pages into Dance All Day because some of those floating synth textures are making me hideously nostalgic for their unparalleled Lave EP. I suspect Fatshaudi and Luca Rain worked together across this dewdrop production whereas the vocals might be… Luca Rain? I went on google and gave them my search data, just so you wouldn’t have to, and still I found virtually nothing about the artists so I went direct to the source to ask for them for some key Fatshaudi and Luca Rain facts. Luca Rain told me that her favourite colour is blue (at the moment). Fatshaudi passed on that she is a piano teacher and that she and Luca Rain are best friends. You can never count on it, but I do think there’s a good chance I’m gonna get a Walkley for this investigative journalism.

Forced into some deeper sleuthing, I can tell you that they’re seemingly from Meanjin / Brisbane and that Rachael (Fatshaudi) also presents a show called Full of Air on 4zzz that focuses on a gamut of electronic sounds and the artists who make them outside the dominant male paradigm.

Here’s a bonus cut from a [probably] Fatshaudi side project called SFT-CR. The same deft production touch applied but applied with the weight of a jackhammer here.

I’ve watched this video too many times now, enjoying the process of my brain deliquescing and hardening back to a goopy solid across the course of its three minutes and forty-two seconds. Can we quickly take a moment here to ackowledge how annoying it is that ‘forty’ is spelled ‘forty’, by the way? Absolute kulak behaviour, no-one needed to drop the ‘u’ out of there. Wild to consider that even though this music video stands paramount as a brilliant piece of visual art, Voidhood’s musical accompaniment is at no point overshadowed. This song bangs, courtesy of that N.E.R.D-esque electronic production and his vocals are a strange mixture of deep tone and alternating flow, changing all the way through.

I first came across Voidhood after he collaborated with fellow Canberra local Ryan Fennis (who you might remember from such early works as ‘To Me’, written about by your guy right here). Ryan and Voidhood teamed up on this high beam record called ‘Tapped’, the first joint release between the two from an upcoming project they had coming. Seemingly, this new single from Voidhood ‘Dissociating’ sees him back on his lonesome, but I’m no less excited to see what the two come up with next.

Meantime, bury yourself in this.

We’ve a penchant for trying to reduce the identity of an artist to one palatable line, something marketing friendly that can sum up a brand neatly and cleanly. Whether it’s queer pop, a regional band making psychedelia or my own personal brand as a digitally irrelevant post-tumblr blog idiot, we love to find easy cover alls and they’re rarely accurate. Except the post-tumblr bit, that’s largely correct. When it comes to ZAN, they’re fundamentally intersectional with layers of identity that don’t peel off individually. I’d love to simply say they’re a Perth artist, but they grew up in Tsukaba Japan before moving to Australia. More recently they’ve been spending time between Melbourne [Naarm], Perth [Boorloo], Lahore, LA and Haripur.

Their songs, the fruit of influences such as Bollywood, Sufi pop songs, Hindustani and Pakistani music and modern neo-soul (likely among others), are beautiful and haunting, none more so than brand new single ‘Tu’. While they’ve an EP behind them already, this song is an elevation. I hear everything from Twigs to Anohni, James Blake to The Weekend, sung in Urdu-Hindi. It’s Zan’s vocal that’ll bury you within seconds. I spent my first listen trying to navigate what elements of their vocal were synthetically modulated and which were just the natural quaver of their voice. In the end, it doesn’t matter in the slightest because however they arrived at this moment, they certainly arrived. We’d do well to note at this point that the track self-produced yet still sounds like this. Dwell on that.

The music video is compiled of found family footage and snippets of their father’s family travels and gatherings and worth watching so as this record hits just right…

In 2021, I exist entirely within one of two modes – dreampop or hip-hop, and you just got a healthy blast of the best in new Australian hip-hop courtesy of 1300. You know what time it is. Please meet Canberra’s Sesame Girl, a band of four who’re but one song deep* yet what a lovely record, truly. Heather’s vocal is effortless, gliding with ease over these beautifully dry but colourful guitars. There’s something about the thickness of her ‘s’ sounds that would drive a speech pathologist mad but is somehow pure cream here. In her slower moments she channels the strength and drawn out power of Victoria Legrand while also retaining a quicker vocal tempo to deliver some of the verses with a little more immediacy.

*A little extra digging has revealed that this is -not- their debut single. It’s been written up as such out there, but it is not. And look, much gets made about artists falsely claiming a new releasing as their debut single when they’ve already had releases under the same moniker but I don’t begrudge it. YOU try navigating an industry that expects you to break on single one lest you become old news. There’re career phases and Get Up certainly feels like the start of something new. There’re some beautifully wilting acoustic singles upon their bandcamp that’ll comfortably find themselves on your ‘ugh, I stayed up all night and the sun’s coming up soon, I’ve made some bad life choices recently’ playlist. Do try one out.

This morning, my guy Rich sent me a text with a link to this song that simply said “Nah this is a f–king moment”. Uncensored of course, but this is a family friendly webzine and we shan’t be allowing that language to befoul these pages. But I hit go and suddenly I was listening to the best new hip-hop song? Out of Australia? Ok then. 2:30 and this record had established itself as one of my favourites of the year, eviscerating me with thick production, flawless flow and bars in Korean. Makes more sense when you consider that this five piece Sydney crew are Korean-Australians, with everything they drop on instagram captioned in both languages. This track doesn’t showcase some slim hat-tip to their culture but a central connection, bleeding through both this and the single they’d released prior. Their first drop ‘Brr’ bangs but ‘No Caller ID’ is The One. The group’s producers pokari.sweat and Nerdie put the beat behind this one and it kicks like a mule in an earthquake. The sounds of hyper-bright laser-rays flit in and the change of MC’s each time seems to be signposted with production affectations, either adding in synths chords or deep 808 bass, such that the whole track embodies movement and it’s brief 150 seconds of life is vibrant. In spite of errything that’s going on in the beat end, the quality of this vocal mix means every line sits sharp atop this thing like crystal on the tablecloth. That’s enough similes for a few weeks now I reckon, please ingest this and let me know what you think.