Josh Santospirito’s debut Is This A Desert? is a long way from its obvious contemporaries (the post-rock set), and their grand aspirations. It’s a poetic piece of music, obviously shaped by its surrounds: the long roads on either side of Alice Springs, the sparse desert environment that seems to stretch on forever, and yet every hundred kilometres or so changes just about completely. The titles tie the songs down to place and time – ‘Dance Under Undoolya’ and “Zoe Buses to Darwin’ – but there’s a warmth to the whole thing that’s far more direct.
The 27-year-old grew up in Melbourne’s suburbs (complete with classical guitar lessons) before finishing school and relocating to the inner north. Musical experimentation, and what he calls “pseudo-jazz” soon followed, a short stint in Sydney (2004) and Josh was off to Central Australia.
You pitched Is This A Desert? as an homage to Australia, as well as a tirade against language. Can you explain it?
The question’ about a few things, I guess. When I first moved to Alice in 2005, I scooted across from Sydney in a clapped out piece-of-shit Ford falcon bought from some Brit who acquired it from that infamous car park in the Cross. I think the car’d done around 430,000 clicks and I realised halfway to Alice that the odometer was stuck so it’d probably done more’n that anyway.
So I got out to the centre of this wide brown land from its biggest city (where I lived in Redfern/Chippendale) and spent a lot of time staring out the car window at the bare South Australia, arrived in Alice and went to work at the hospital for a while. The hospital had this pool where I spent a lot of my non-working hours underwater. I had this photo taken of me with one of those disposable underwater cameras floating… flying underwater really. In those contemplative moments when the sound is muffled by two metres of chlorinated water, kids splashing above, etc, you sometimes come up with thoughts that are kind of poignant… the photo was completely aquamarine and I remember thinking when I saw it… Is THIS a desert? And that phrase kind of stuck in my head.
After a while I realised that ‘Australia’ is a very east-coast-centric concept, politically, economically. And we’ve built up a self-image of Australia being full of ‘nothing’ …the outback. The more I lived in Alice, the more I realised that there are tracks everywhere, houses everywhere, you’d be hard pressed to really find a place where there is ‘nothing’. People live all over this country.
With Australia being a bit lop-sided, leaning to the east, I found a lot of the political rhetoric that filters down to the people here is completely out of whack. Brendan Nelson, the smarmy bastard, completely epitomised this by saying something like, “Why on Earth can’ people in the middle of nowhere have low-level and intermediate level waste?” And now, because it’s nice and topical, they suddenly open up three possibilities for nuclear dumps and more uranium mines in the territory. Opinions on uranium aside, I began to understand that decisions are made about the territory by people in far away cities, and those people use this notion of ‘middle of nowhere’ and ‘nothing’ and concepts of what ‘deserts’ look like to create the fiction that it doesn’ matter what happens to a place. I’m not the only person out here to have gotten incensed about that kind of attitude so I decided to make a homage to the many hidden places on this continent as a way of reminding people that there are worthwhile things everywhere, nooks and crannies everywhere. Not just a big red rock, but there are people, there are stories… there are animals and ecosystems.
The Aussie cultural identity has been partially built on this idea of nothing which is a load of shit, and now our perception of our country is being abused in the pursuit of money and votes.
How does your music connect to being out in the middle of the country and making an album about the dry earth?
I figure that this land is filled with stories and legends and nostalgia and myth-makers so I thought I’d join them in mythologising it through a sepia-toned wonder of how the land was created, who lives here now, and the places that you pass through in long car trips. I hope it is whimsical and nostalgic in melody, with its roots steeped in minimalism and counterpoint, whilst being punctuated by the occasionally striking and loud moments that often happen when you’re on a voyage of discovery…adventures.
The music doesn’ always relate to the country, more snippets of dreams or people I have met. “King Sound’ is sort of an exercise in ebbs and flows that directly relates to the huge tides at Derby in the Kimberley. ‘Where in buggery is Borroloola?’ is about map-reading and the pictures that you create in your mind’ eye when you hear names or see dots on maps. Though there’ a couple of places that the music related to – “Pareroultja’ is named after a lovely older indigenous lady I met in my adventures who came from Haast’s Bluff, a community nestled amongst this weird and wonderful bunch of cliffs, and a twisted rolling shaped hill which the music describes through counterpointing around like Marlene’ dot paintings, different dots to those on maps. “Road Train’ was my stab at minimalist crescendo to describe those wonderful straight roads of Len Beadell’ (the ‘road artist’) and how long it takes for a truck on the horizon to actually pass you… it seems to take hours sometimes.
You self-released the record and made your own packaging – what was involved in the process?
I like making things home-made as a rule, it adds a personal element that I thought was also significant to the theme. The country is unique and so is each person’s impressions of it. The emphasis on discovering the country’ hideaway places also means that the audience is going to have to invest some energy to the idea which I hope translates to the method that I have chosen to sell this CD – old fashioned mail-order.
Mainstream music’s emphasis on downloading music means that the personal element to the purchasing music is a bit lost, so I thought it would be cool for people to do mail-order purchasing, since that’s kind of what I end up doing for lack of better shops in Alice anyway. Not that it’s been particularly successful mind you, people prefer the easy way. I made about 100 and have so far sold around 50.
I made the packaging and the design myself because it was a labour of love. My partner, Nadine, who is a graphic designer, made countless suggestions and explained book-making to my inferior brain. The boab design just came from my obssession with those trees whilst I was gallavanting around the Kimberley region last year.
Where did the materials for the package come from?
The materials were rescued from destruction actually. The cardboard was being thrown out in huge volumes… the leather binding that I had on about 50 spines was also rescued from a dress-maker in the Victoria Market, Melbourne. The paper for the inner booklet was throw-away stuff too. The only new item in the booklet was the cloth for the cover, the screen-ink and the stamp I had made.
What’s the relationship between the music and the poetry/prose in the liner notes?
The liner notes comes from the same collection of dreams and thoughts that the music was born of. The liner notes often refers to the music in the way that I have imagined the entire project, though this might only be obvious in some of the song titles perhaps.
How do you get music, or is the music you listen to mostly things you’ve been listening to for a long time?
I’ve been listening to a lot of music for a long time but I am obsessed with finding new sounds, so I am constantly scouring the world for new music. There is one decent CD store in town that I frequent regularly, but I buy more obscure music through the internet, nothing more glorious than receiving a parcel in the post. Bands such as The Necks have been penetrating my skull for years, but for the last year I have been flipping the pages of myspace in the hope of finding other obscure individuals such as myself that might be out there.
What’s the musical community in Alice like?
There is something of a musical community in Alice. The older residents tell us young’uns that there used to be far more venues in the ’90s and music almost every night, but these places have since been closed down and there are only a handful left. There is a lefty element to Alice, which means there are a fair few artists, but for the most part John Butler is the flavour. It is a bit more unusual in its taste than your average NSW/Vic/Qld redneck town since most of the inhabitants of Alice come from a major city…
I imagine you might as well be making sandpaper noise music out there, from my short experience with the various covers bands, have you played much? What’s the response?
Cover bands? Did you go to Monday night at the Todd?
I played a few times… one was a disaster, with the manager of the event, a putrid little poltroon carny of a man jumping all over the stage whilst I was playing and introducing me thus: “Josh will now play some Experimental Music, whatever that means.” Which just put me in bad mood from the fucken beginning.
The response from another gig at an art opening was extremely positive. I also played at the Live & Let DIY festival in Brisbane in December ’06 and got a very positive response despite my looping pedal blowing up half the warehouse’s power supply, having to drive through the city to find a music store to buy a new adapter only to return 1.5 hrs later to find my audience had mostly left. People say nice things mostly.
Is This A Desert? is available mail-order via Josh’s blog.
