Cyclic Selects: Cured Pink

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My first contact with Brisbane artist Cured Pink came via a pairing with percussionist Will Guthrie over fifteen years ago at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival. Back then he was solo, and slightly aggressive, hurling around a giant metal chain perilously close to audience members seated at his feet. Guthrie meanwhile acted like everything was normal, offering a blitzkrieg of percussive blasts. It was a remarkable performance, dangerous, unhinged, eccentric, analogue industrial, and literally metal – you couldn’t tear your eyes away for a second. Cured Pink has retained these elements whilst expanding into a fully fledged band, releasing singles and albums on Sabbatical, Another Dark Age, RIP Society, and their most recent cassette, the raw slightly demented Live in The City That Produced Mu’s Motion In Tune Lp in 1981, which has just been released on Room40’s A Guide To Saints. With such an eclectic approach to constructing sound we figured it was about time we reached out for a Cured Pink Cyclic Selects. True to form it’s anything but a normsl Selects. Read on:

In September 2015 Cured Pink toured several countries upon the continent of Europe for the first time. Throughout, conversations nearby computers would regularly descend towards the comforting sameness of Youtube and related searches. Youtube and other content platforms have proved a useful method of dialogue-eclipsing cultural exchange, a content-fill to scale remaining language barriers (the majority of which we upheld monolingually on our end). Youtube became as orientating as the tour van’s GPS. A number of conversations would slip or be deliberately driven toward a host’s curiosity of how our domestic interests were best expressed online, reminding me that the most detailed expression of some cultures are via its banalities.

For some reason I found this near the top of any search pile when prompted (or – even more rarely – invited). I forgot what the content may have appeared to be at first to anyone watching the search terms being applied to the keyboard – as if I was a petty shock-freak that hadn’t grown out of faecal tales – but gladly the short-duration could quickly get toward the point. There’s a few questions you could ask about it and how the video came to be but most of them quickly dissipate in their ultimate irrelevance. I was surprised how often people understood precisely the humour and what we found funny it in too. I can only suppose whatever is charming in here is equally disquieting. Bonus points went to the appearance of a strip of the Bruce Highway in South East Queensland, in a much more dynamic manner than Google Maps can allow.

When pressed for examples or updates on comedy deploying and shaping (white) Australian stereotypes, it was hard to stray farther than user generated content. NIDA-trained accents didn’t need to be forcefully bludgeoned into some kind of emulation. It seemed to be registered immediately.

What other kinds of mundanity can be summoned for our host one morning in Poznan, Poland.

Or one evening in Amsterdam.

But what music could we share? What may have not made it far out of the borders which narrow a limited index of cultural expressions – something precious that sits apart from default musical exports? What’s a story and song that really needs to be heard?

And what curiosities of our vain civic pride?


And what else colours the landscape billowing by.

Cured Pink’s Live in The City That Produced Mu’s Motion In Tune Lp in 1981 is available on Room40’s A Guide To Saints. You can find it here.

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Bob is the features editor of Cyclic Defrost. He is also evil. You should not trust the opinions of evil people.

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