Sure, there’s distorted guitar and synths and acoustic guitar, voices and maybe even a laptop or two. But they are just the background. The real lead instrument across this single track, 28 minute album is Craig McElhinney’s reverb unit(s). He plays them with all the love and care a classical musician might bestow upon their vintage instrument and obtains a similar level of technical accomplishment. Often, the reverb is in canyon mode, creating vast swathes of sound. At the 8 1/2 minute mark the reverb seems to turn in on itself, disconnect completely from its source sound and become its own, autonomous timbre. This bleeds into an episode of acoustic guitar which the reverb renders so distorted and vibrant that it almost becomes a sitar, sympathetic overtones blending with the played tones.
On the surface, it may sound like a simple matter of turning an fx unit on and letting it add weight to half formed musical ideas but I can assure you it is a far more difficult technical feat than this. McElhinney’s success seems to come from the minimalism of his source material. Simple timbres are used and not piled up, meaning that the tail of echo has room to shimmer and breathe rather than just dissolve into mush. When the source material is denser, the reverb is pulled back to merely expansive, as in the acoustic guitar raga around the 20 minute mark, McElhinney in deft control. As a suite, things keep moving along with a variety of sound sources taking a few minutes each, but the combined effect is monolithic. The upshot is that there is no room for boredom on the listener’s part. The bio tells me the entire piece is a collage of snippets of work built up over a two year period. That can be heard in the tonal variety. But the æsthetic focus is beautifully consistent.
Twice Removed is a new label which seems to have links to some of the more interesting exploratory fringes of the current Australian underground, such as Grave New World and Muepe. This is their first release and points to a bright future. In a climate where lazy production attempts to hide a lack of ideas in the areas of drone, psych and noise, McElhinney shows that obfuscating effects can be ‘played’ masterfully, without losing any of the immediacy of DIY and lo-fi. And where the music of many of his peers doesn’t stand up to repeated listening, I’ve found myself constantly drawn back to Sore Loser‘s soundworld, desiring to wallow in its beauty over and over.
Adrian Elmer
