There’s a little Sydney clique that’s been bearing fruit over the last few years that centers up the likes of Nick Ward, Zion Garcia, Sollyy, Dylan Atlantis and Breakfast Road. It’s called… I don’t know. It probably doesn’t have a name and the more I think about it, the more insane it seems to actually name a friendship group. Anyway, two of those earlier mentioned are the protagonists in today’s story. Sollyy, a producer whose ideas are starting to shape more than a hand full of local records this year has roped in Zion, a vocalist whoms flows have been largely emotive and introspective across his limited output. Full disclosure, I work with Sollyy, but historically that’s never guaranteed I’d write about a song on this webzine so assurances be, this record is a real one. You know what, why don’t you just go ahead and hit play while you read.

45 seconds with swelling tension, rising temperature and leftfield samples and Zion showering one liners around your ears. Then it hits. The most pure house bass line you’ll hear in 2023, sucking everything around it in like a collapsing blackhole with only Zion’s vocal capable of resisting its improbable gravity. I’ve LOVED hearing Zion on his inner heart tip over the last couple years but this steezy, high impact flow of his bowled me straight on my ass. For reference, have at ‘Overthinking’, a little something Zion gave us earlier this year that’s been a mainstay for my 2am moments few as they are in my parent era.

Pretty bloody beautiful huh. Back on Apply The Pressure though, and credit has goooooot to be paid for the way Sollyy has hammered down this production with total force and subtlety. It hits so hard on the beat end yet everything arrives just at the right moment and transitions so cleanly. How nice is it to hear collaboration between two artists who clearly love working together too, you can tell when it’s not phoned in. One full circle thing to add that pleased me on an inner level is that the title and lyric in this track ‘We can still die a legend, still I apply the pressure’ is a tight little reference to an officially unreleased Tkay vocal. A couple years back I hit up Tkay for some bars for triple j Unearthed DIY Supergroup and she obliged with some proper flambé. This line featured among them and was a producers favourite through the comp (por ejemplo) but hearing it reimagined like this? That’s amore.

About a year and a half back and I was on this website claiming that Matahara had “a supremely bright future ahead of her” and even though you all came at my neck over it, I’m the one who’s come out on top. Egg and your face; they are as one. Matahara evidently went out of her way to vindicate me because this is no light step forward from her debut EP but a fairly substantial leap into something more buoyant. This is a shoe in for those with a sweet spot for those older Alpine records or more recent Superorganism cuts but neither reference is going to give you much indication of what’s going on here. The guitars are far fizzier than those we’ve heard previously and there’s a driving drum track courtesy of regular collaborator Tram Cops. While we’re talking Trammies, I do believe that’s his vocal we’re hearing on the track too by the by, sliced in delicately in the early chorus. Wonderful, weird record from an artist I’d be doing everything I could to try to sign if I still had my own lil label.

This one came through the triple j Unearthed moderation queue with a minimum of fanfare despite Munan (real name Peter Lee) having a relatively storied experience in Korea in recent years. Canberra born, he moved to Korea, was a part of a duo named Chimmi and did some fairly high profile co-writing before dropping this record, the first under the Munan project. Think that fairly airy, west coast indie with a latent pop sensibility. Think UMO, Methyl Ethel, Hector Morlet, Tame obvi… all the greats really. The way that vocal melody rolls gently downwards given impetus behind the bassline is just *chefs kiss*. Please delight yourself with it below.

This week at BIGSOUND I had sufficient people declare to me that they missed the halcyon days of sound doctrine blog so as it made me think that perhaps I should try to write a little more. And sure, I know I miss a lot of things that I’d long since stopped caring about when they ceased activity, but this comes with the added bonus of stamping a few more songs more permanently into the lineage of the blog, rather than in the ebb and flow of my spotty playlist. Twelve years of writing and I’m still pedalling these run on sentences like they don’t hurt the brain.

A record I’d most certainly have already written about if I’d been Doing Words lately is the new Babyface Mal. Man’s had a pair of mini-EPs this year as well as Daughters & Sons late last year, one of a fair few centred around a drill beat within his repetoir. Incidentally, it might have been the precursor to the Ya Rab since both sets of production are built around oud lines. Before we get into Mal, and we WILL get into Mal, we gotta take a moment for Ya Rab’s producer aywy. The production here is milk and honey, the right choices made from the oud to the hand drums to that thundering four to the floor release after the chorus. I’m itching to ring this one through car subs just to hasten the imminent demise of my hearing.

Mal though. Mal’s been threatening to elevate for a few years now, since the LP and many times since but this is the one that shows a different space for the Turkish / Egyptian rapper. He’s been making a name for himself as part of that 66 crew down Melbourne way but flag placed in the ground with this one, Mal’s upscaled bigtime. He gallops on this beat he was born in a saddle, confident and constant in flow and dashing between languages with absolute nonchelance. This lad can evidently hit just as hard in Arabic as he does in English and I’d be hoping that this is the start of more bilingual moments on his records ahead. Shoutout to the early French he dropped on Lancome but we’re not counting that here.

Rinse Ya Rab if you haven’t been doing that already this last month.

You ever hear a record that you feel fundamentally unqualified to write about? Well that’s me with every record, but especially this one. On a technical front it’s the chaotic ad-libs deep in the production, the driving drums, the visual imagery (“full moon, blazing, midnight, bleeding”) and the pulsing hearbeat of the track, hypnotic as it thuds on and on, thick with life. But then there’s the lived experience of E.T, real name Etima who was born in DR Congo to a father of significant political position, so much so that when regime change occurred, his life was thrown into flux. While just a child, Etima was captured by mercenaries while playing in the street and held captive for six days before rescue. He still doesn’t know what happened to his friend Aura, who was left behind.

He’s a self identified student of metaphysics and has been since birth, prodding and probing the experience of life, death and the afterlife having emotionally engaged with these concepts since birth. Later on he’d dive into the words of Frederic William Henry Myers and his book ‘Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death’ (peep the book in the music video) and found truth in them, in the idea that the soul continues on after the death of the body. Somehow, discovering this didn’t surprise me in the slightest having heard Psalm Ritual. Something about it reeks of both life and death with the repeated chorus “Nzambe ya ba Koko” – Lingala for “Ancestral GOD”.

Hopefully you’ll understand why I feel the effect of this song but don’t have the frame of reference, the frame of experience to pull it apart in any meaningful way. Similar to my experience though, hopefully you’ll find the chaos and transcendence of it pierce you much the same. Real special one!