Distance. Time and memory. Transience. Ephemeral. The Slated Pines brings these words to the forefront of my consciousness. These are the haunted radio transmissions of a giant’s orchestra: sonorities pan across the stereo field and through the listeners’ synapses. Bringing to mind the work of Nurse With Wound, Todd Dockstader, Chris Watson and late-period Main, Shane Fahey has a long and illustrious musical history to rival any of these artists. Starting out in arty post-punk Sydney outfit Makers of the Dead Travel Fast from 1979 to 1983, Shane’s trajectory has seen him recording a veritable plethora of Australian artists over the past twenty years at Megaphon studios. Forming Social Interiors with Rik Rue and Julian Knowles in the 1984, he has had over two decades to hone his self-proclaimed ‘old school film post-production techniques’; tape manipulations, musique concrete, field recordings and an atmosphere of unsettled sinisterness.
The Slated Pines unravels as a cohesive whole, though the album’s seven tracks each boast a distinct voice. There’s the howling rigging and sooty-tunnelled chugging of an aging locomotive on ‘Mis-spotter’ and campfire and cicada filled meditations on ‘Scatter Floor For Food’. The ‘Book of Trees’ is somewhat baffling (in a good way) with it’s orchestral interlude complete with childlike glossolalia. There is also a wide variety of imagined apocalyptic variations, from the arcane medieval macabre of Hieronymus Bosch to a distinctly more WWII variety.
by Oliver Laing
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