It begins with a dull thud, like the sound of a cassette recorder grinding into action. There’s a tiny moment of silence and then the tape hiss rapidly flowers into a high-frequency whale call; a sub-marinal wail that glides over the sonic mess and lazily woos distant organ notes into focus. The sparse elements gradually mesh together and push against the speakers until a gravelly dissonance subsumes every feature, though occasionally elements – notes and oscillations – come together like a solemn note in a strange, dream-like song. In time the colliding sonics become one colossal, blissful nether region.
The song is ‘Airfish’ and it appears on Moonmilk’s 2007 Soviet Records release The Winter Sun Has Teeth. It’s one of their most azure forays into drone: an eighteen minute expedition (yep, expedition is the best word for their work) that sounds sodden – nay, submerged – in the deepest waters in the Pacific. This isn’t delicate music – there’s no intelligent design at work here. Instead, it’s more like the big bang: the Moonmilk duo trigger these multifaceted sound worlds and prod them along, but in doing so they become more than human. They’re also elemental.
Sydneysiders Kell Derrig-Hall and Lia Tsamaglou started Moonmilk in 2004, when Lia bought a sequential synthesizer. This purchase, as well as contact with the then-current experimental scene in Sydney, gave focus to their collective tendencies. “We’d been going to the Frequency Lab to see some NowNow shows, which we really liked initially,” Lia remembers, “around that time we’d started jamming together, putting effects through the keyboard and recording it through a four track.”
Kell had experimented with field recordings in the past. “Before Lia got the synth I’d been doing recordings during the night and early morning from out of my bedroom window at my mum’s house,” he says, “then I’d run the recordings through the guitar pedals. Lia had heard that stuff and was interested in it, so the synth came as a good way of combining what we were both doing separately.”
The couple played their first show at the Frequency Lab, on a bill with Chris Abrahams of The Necks. Later, on Easter day 2005, they witnessed Newcastle experimental six-piece Castings at the Lansdowne Hotel, during one of the SoundNoSound events that members of Castings were instrumental in organising. “We said to Castings that we really liked their music and we�d never seen anyone do something similar to what we do,” Lia recalls, “Nick [Senger, of Castings] was really keen to swap email addresses. So we sent SoundNoSound a demo of songs we had recorded and they really liked it, so we ended up playing a Castings support.”
At around the same time Kell and Lia were regular attendees at a short-lived performance space in Pyrmont called Iraq, which was situated in a condemned building and only lasted a few months. During that period the space hosted Kell’s pre-Moonmilk experimental rock group Piano Get Small as well as Castings, The Thaw, Pure Evil Trio, Alps of New South Wales and even The Hard Ons, among other groups. “Moonmilk was meant to play there once,” Lia says, “but we couldn’t because it was Greek Easter.”
“Around that time there was a big group of people who were all into the same thing,” Lia remembers, “Sound & Fury had opened, Iraq was going on, Yvonne Ruve at Hibernian House was starting. By that stage SoundNoSound had stopped doing as many shows but there was still a collective. It helped broaden our minds to other forms of music.”
“Iraq brought all these different groups together,” Lia says. “But now everyone does their separate things. There are different factions.”
The culmination of Sound & Fury’s arrival in Sydney – with the store’s focus on experimental music and private press labels – as well as the accommodating spaces in which to play, brought a legitimacy to the type of pop-experimental music that groups like Moonmilk aspire towards: a musically abstract form that strives to affect emotionally and imaginatively as much as it questions preconceived notions of music. It was an idyllic middle ground between the harsh noise and detached, exploratory laptop music they had witnessed previously.
“Castings were one of the first great experimental bands I’d ever seen,” Kell remembers, “and when we saw them it was amazing. They had a more spacious approach. It wasn’t really aggressive and it wasn’t clinical. Meeting other people with personalised approaches to that was great too, because often it was either super academic or very macho. Seeing Castings was a way of realising that people were taking such an approach to this style of music. It was different to the ‘press this and bang’ approach, all the screeching stuff. There was lots of laptop experimentation as well,” Kell makes a clicking sound, “it was very quiet stuff, very academic.”
The duo released three recordings in 2006: a cassette entitled Willow Song/Live In Newcastle, a split cassette with UK based artist Quetzolcoatl, and a Soviet Records live recording of a show the duo played at the Lansdowne Hotel, a performance that saw the band heckled severely by the notoriously rowdy (and rawk-orientated) Lansdowne clientele. These releases culminated in what the duo regard as their first �proper� release, The World Creaks on Spanish Magic.
“‘The World Creaks’ [the title track to the album]freaked me out when I listened back to it,” Lia says of the song, “even though we were using the same instruments and the same combinations. We were jamming to prepare for a show we had that night. When we stopped, we thought it was the most amazing thing ever. It seemed like it came from nowhere.”
The World Creaks is something of an anomaly in the Moonmilk canon for the inclusion of ‘Light Limbs’: a track the group claim to have “composed” to a greater degree than anything else they’ve committed to tape. It also features Lia’s eerily disconnected vocals: a wordless, sighing presence that climbs up and down notes in a hauntingly off-key manner – like a siren’s vocals on a near exhausted vinyl record. It’s one of the most chilling moments they’ve committed to tape. When the duo play live their setup normally consists of two synthesizers and a diverse array of effects pedals. Lia often kicks off the proceedings and Kell adds elements while overlaying effects until the two separate constituents meld together into a blissful, immersive whole.
The couple don’t often “compose” like they did with ‘Light Limbs’, and their parts in the construction of Moonmilk’s sound worlds are fairly cemented. “We’ve sort of fallen into roles,” Lia says, “normally Kell starts and I’ll form a loop, and then we’ll continue to layer.”
“Lia doesn’t like to start,” Kell adds.
“That’s because I’m scared you won’t find my note, so I find yours,” Lia explains.
In 2007, the pair played two collaborative sets with Sydney outfit Rand and Holland, a meeting that saw the solemn intensity of the latter gel transcendentally with the former. They also spent much of that year playing shows in licensed venues – supporting more widely palatable groups that appreciated what they were doing – and having a crisis of confidence as a result, Moonmilk hinted at a hiatus early in 2008.
Thankfully the hiatus didn’t eventuate: the group have played a number of shows throughout the year, visited Melbourne, and recorded a split 7-inch with Italian duo My Cat Is An Alien, due out on the Sound & Fury label any day now. A split cassette with US duo Eyes has just been released, and UK label Recollections of Knulp is set to reissue The World Creaks.
It’s now 2008 and the duo are focusing more on their respective solo projects. Kell has his Tired Hands project, which sees him shifting into a more pastoral, singer-songwriter direction, while Lia writes as Melodie Nelson, a project that also leans towards songwriting and lyricism more than Moonmilk’s material could ever have hinted at. The duo have also released what may go down as one of their darkest moments in the form of ‘A Strange House’, their contribution to a split CD-R with power electronics outfit Heil Spirits. All in all, it turns out Moonmilk have been busier this year than ever.
“Both of us have seen colours when we’ve played,” Kell says, reflecting on the pleasures of creating Moonmilk’s sound worlds, “We’re both pretty aware of sounds in everyday life. If we hear something interesting we both prick our ears.”
Is it spiritual? “There may be a spiritual aspect to sharing sound experiences with an audience of other people in that environment.” Kell reflects, “We have planes flying above us all the time, it sounds like you could jump and touch them here. There’s always extreme sounds around us all the time, in the inner west.”
“When we record something and then play it back we often tell each other what it reminds us of, visually or otherwise,” Lia says.
She adds quietly, as if imparting a secret, “Sometimes we agree, sometimes it’s the same thing.”
The World Creaks is re-released through Recollections of Knulp.
