Melbourne duo Fabulous Diamonds make experiential music designed to bore into your skull through sheer grinding repetition. It’s a musical hypnotism, where once it begins banging around inside your brain a funny thing happens, you forget you’re even listening to music. It’s all internal, and it’s endlessly fascinating. It’s like they’ve laid the foundation and its up to the individual listener to do the rest. They’re working off minimal ingredients, the repetitive keys, whether that be wurlitzter or synth, the metronomic percussion and the occasional vocals. But even the vocals (which sound like they were recorded in a giant reverberent hall) become a highly repetitive mantra. There are changes and developments in the music, however it’s quite restrained, the smallest gestures reverberating endlessly.
They sound like no one else. It seems somehow bold and uncompromising to be working off such minimal ingredients, yet it’s precisely this stripped down quality combined with their repetition that gives the music such trance like qualities. In fact you could almost call it organ ritual music, or transcendental synth music, the repetition increasing the intensity and power of the music until it takes on the form of your favourite deity. Perhaps this could account for them naming their second album II and not using track titles – leaving it up to the listener to cloak the music anyway they wish. Regardless this is powerful music, there is a deep narcotic groove you can sink into, but it’s also static, so whilst the textures of the keys are continually engaging, and it’s impossible to not respond to even the slightest variation, there is something a little unnerving going on here. And that’s a good thing.
Bob Baker Fish
