Meet your guy Hector Morlet who plays Clarinet and sang this song. He’s got a bunch of soundcloud lo-fi hip-hop beat type records floating around that are really quite nice, particularly those you’ll find on his descriptively titled ‘Hec’s 10:00 [EP]‘. It runs for 10 minutes, that’s extremely accurate. The songs I like most from that release are the ones where he’s spilled his vocals across them, low slung and draped in comfort like an afterthought while he calmly produced the beats live. It’s warm and homely, as the truest bedroom hip-hop beats should always be. Here’s another I really appreciated called Golden Sheets.

He also did a bit of a sing for Noah Dillon and is one of the merry band of Bush Chooks that Jack Davies has assembled. He’s evidently a man about Perth, someone vested in a community. We should talk about Picture Frame though, because it’s quite a long way from any of those soundclouds I mentioned. On this, his first kinda… ‘official’ single I guess, he’s gone yachting on the French Riviera, holidaying in a Neapolitan coastal manse. It’s a timeshare Still Woozy with a short term booking courtesy of Kings of Convenience paid for entirely in the credit of that clarinet. I know I’ve already said it, but I’d like you to acknowledge that you’ve heard me when I remind you that it is indeed Hec himself on that ‘Rinet (shoutout to my woodwind heads) as well as every other instrument on the track I think maybe.

Indie Randy Newman really killed it with Picture Frame, a track I’ve listened to at least 15 times in the past week already. Gorgeous and thick on groove, hang this in the… hang it in… HANG THIS IN THE LOUVRE I’M SO SORRY.

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.