Fortuitously #7

 

Even now, when things on my latest list of the good things in life suddenly seem to connect together naturally, it is such a glorious feeling. Plus, there’s the added bonus of a sense of having joined the dots without any help. Perhaps, to counter this, one should sometimes question why it took so long to do so, but then life’s not perfect. Far from it sometimes. With this particular adventure the link turned out to be the Efficient Space label of Melbourne whose activities tied together a series of inspirational sounds.

I guess this ‘journey into sound’ started, and this must seem inevitable for me, with NTS, my radio station of choice as I will have often mentioned. Listening back to their shows sometimes it is possible to work out what is being played via the playlist or track listing, but that is not always the case. So, this being the modern world, where necessary one resorts to Shazam sometimes when something seizes the attention.

And, according to the app’s history, in May last year I must have looked up a track that turned out to be the acoustic version of Hydroplane’s ‘New Monotonic FM’, a thing of exquisite beauty that took my breath away. It was one of those special moments that come along only rarely. I didn’t have any idea about who or what Hydroplane were but, again this being the modern world, I opened Spotify to investigate further.

‘New Monotonic FM’ it turned out was a track on the debut LP released by Hydroplane originally in 1997, a record and a group I was completely unaware of. The record got a new lease of life when released on vinyl in 2022, but again I was oblivious to this. Doing a bit of research, as one does nowadays, I learned that Hydroplane evolved out of The Cat’s Miaow, a name at least I recognised as part of the Melbourne-branch of the 1990s international pop underground scene, even if I was not familiar with their music.

For me, in the 1990s, labels like Warp, Mo’Wax and Thrill Jockey changed everything. I would like to think something similar was also the case for members of Hydroplane, which may be why on their debut LP the melodic melancholy and wistfulness of their pop sounds would occasionally be augmented by hip-hop beats, loops and samples as befits a post-Endtroducing (midnight in a perfect) world which makes sense to me. I mean, why wouldn’t you be inspired by DJ Shadow or Tortoise at that time?

The other version of ‘New Monotonic FM’ on the LP comes with crashing beats, but the attention is still held by Kerrie Bolton’s beguiling vocals which are like a much-needed loving hug. I have to confess my first reaction or the initial attraction was an imagined connection to the godlike genius of Alison Statton, or shall we say the Young Marble Giants’ works and the later Alison Statton and Spike recordings. That may seem like lazy labelling, but I am not sure the band would mind too much as the opening track on the Hydroplane LP is called ‘Wurlitzer Jukebox’ and it is not a cover, as far as I know. There are Joe Meek references in the song titles too, which fits rather nicely.

Similarly, listening to the album, I found myself thinking about early Saint Etienne and the songs that held the most appeal, that is the dubbier, downtempo numbers and the slow-motion hip-hop beats on some of the ballads. Again, I am not sure Hydroplane would object too much at such convenient comparisons as I understand The Cat’s Miaow covered ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’.

Anyway, my newly acquired and strictly limited knowledge of Hydroplane would be thrown into a state of confusion when Spotify advised me at the end of 2025 that a new Hydroplane LP, A Place In My Memory Is All I Have To Claim, their first in nearly 25 years, had been released. This, in my opinion, turned out to be even more appealing than the debut, which is not something one says very often about artists returning after a long hiatus. Despite being recorded many years apart, there is a clear connection between these two Hydroplane LPs, visually and sonically, which is appealing.

This time around there are less explicit beat excursions, and maybe more in the way of atmospherics and I suspect vintage electronica. That is, coincidentally or not, quite vogue-ish, when you think of recent work by Jeremiah Chiu and even Sam Prekop’s preoccupation (prekopupation?) with ancient synth sounds. The most recent Hydroplane record features understated guitar colouration, and ambient soundscapes, which for me fits with the inspirational return of Seefeel. But more to the point there is on this Hydroplane record hints of ‘Cheree’ and more of those early Suicide ballads (or, well, they were hymns really, weren’t they: “Keep them dreams burning, baby”.

This is an area of activity that is proving very rewarding of late: Fly The Ocean in a Silver Plane by Pan-American is a huge current favourite, as is the slightly older Faith by Purelink with Loraine James singing on ‘Rookie’ which allows me to mention her own recent astonishing work as Whatever The Weather. What really works for Hydroplane is where Kerrie comes in singing, with the years enriching her voice. She makes me think of other great ballad singers who returned to recording after long absences, like Audrey Morris or Pinky Winters, and who sound better than ever.

The second milestone in this journey of discovery came in July 2025 when I heard ‘Gold Plan’ by Troth on NTS (oh yes!) and fell instantly in love with it. I guess mentally my immediate mental connection was to the spirit of Pram and maybe again to Alison Statton & Spike. I would like to think this Troth track might be something Alison would approve of. I say that with some conviction after stumbling across a post from the end of 2020 on the Tone Glow site where Alison chose some of her favourite records, and delightfully these included titles by Tom Zé, Augustus Pablo, Getz / Gilberto, The Congos, Velvets, Fela Kuti, Tom Waits and Robert Wyatt, among others.

Troth, I discovered, were the experimental pop duo of Amelia Besseny and Cooper Bowman, and ‘Gold Plan’ I found out was a highlight of their new LP, An Unfinished Rose, which became for me a highlight of the Summer of 2025. Since then, I have listened to them a lot, and consistently I find Troth such a fascinating entity. Since 2020, one way and another, they have been pretty prolific and the music they make has evolved gradually. I’m not sure if it is a case of feeling an allegiance to the place of entry into their canon but An Unfinished Rose is, for me, their most fully realised work.

Among the random things I have learned about Troth is that they host a regular show on NTS, and are based in Nipaluna, Tasmania or if you prefer Hobart which once again has odd mental connections to early Saint Etienne songs: “Rain falls, like Elvis' tears.” Did they really sing that? I was never sure, and never wanted to ask, just in case. I love Amelia’s singing. And she has something of a young Sissy Spacek gamine thing going on, which is fine. Generally, the music she makes with Cooper is gorgeously spiritual, a mix of natural elements, electronics, a bit of piano, the occasional mournful melodica, some wayward woodwind.

This is refreshingly DIY and abstract, as Nature intended, with a lithe looseness to their dub disco folk ballads and ambient torch songs. In the present tense I sense connections to Spiritual World’s Teal and maybe instrumentally an affinity with Laura Cannell. But what I really found myself unexpectedly thinking of while exploring Troth’s treasure trove was Tenniscoats and a time 20-odd-years ago when their eccentric avant-pop was the best thing around and you could send off for records from Japan without having a nervous breakdown at postage costs and receive CDs in no time. Coincidentally or not, Takashi Ueno from Tenniscoats helped organise a recent Troth tour of Japan and participated too.

 

 

The third milestone in this voyage of discovery was finding Ali Omar’s Hashish Hits in January of this year, thanks to the end-of-year selections by Miles J. Paralysis of the Bradford-based Crying Outcast label on the often-useful Ban Ban Ton Ton site. He got me intrigued when he wrote: “Eight absolutely stone-cold dub-inspired flavours, which have been on repeat on many of my shows this year. Variation across the board yet intrinsically linked by a relaxing nature crafted expertly by the late Ali Omar. Shades of Muslimgauze and Unitone Hifi, this album explores the hazy and uncanny environments born from the meeting of Arabic and sound system culture to perfection.”

So, I investigated on Spotify and Bandcamp. Initially I found the collection rather lovely, but I soon became hooked, in a stealth-like sleeper way, so that it gradually became indispensable. It seems the tracks date from the later half of the 1990s into the early 2000s and seem to connect in my mind to several things that are very much on my list of good things in life.

These include Ultramarine’s squelchy groove, Unique 3-style slow motion bleep and bass sounds, The Black Dog and Plaid, Autechre’s Incunabula, Nightmares On Wax’s Smokers Delight, abstract downtempo hip-hop soundscapes in general, Mo’Wax things like Attica Blues’ ‘Blueprint’ and RPM’s ‘2000’, Pole and Rhythm & Sound, plus perhaps some of the activity on J. Saul Kane’s D.C. Recordings at the dawn of the new millennium.

Ali Omar has a great backstory too, somehow along the way relocating from Liverpool to Sydney via Manchester and London. Maybe incongruously his biography states he was a brother of Beryl Marsden who is a big favourite here, particularly for her recordings of ‘Music Talk’ and ‘Let’s Go Somewhere’, electrifying mid-1960s UK responses to Motown magic. And if you are raising an inquisitive eyebrow at that, the Liverpool Footprints site states Beryl’s mother married Mohamed Bin Omar in 1969. You live and learn. I have also learned that there were four Ali Omar LPs which will hopefully be salvaged in full at some stage. I still find it so totally disorientating and intoxicating stumbling upon whole areas of cultural activity that are new to me, if not exactly new in a temporal sense.

The fourth and final milestone on this adventure in February 2026 was hearing ‘I Don’t Fade’ by Th Blisks, again on NTS. This time my Shazam app told me it was from the LP How So?, a 2025 reissue of a record originally released in 2022 on Cooper Bowman’s long-running Altered States tape label. I had no idea who Th Blisks were, but it seems that rather like Holy Tongue being a collaboration between Al Wootton with Valentina Magaletti and occasionally Zongamin, so Th Blisks are Troth’s Amelia and Cooper with Yuta Matsumura, who kind of cover similar ground to Holy Tongue but they are slightly more poppier

Their template seems to take in beatific melodica-led dub and ambient drifts, via slow-motion beats and ultra-pop washes of sound. Again, there seems to be a bit of a 1990s pop thing going on and, for example, bizarrely the melodica moments made me think of Dub Narcotic Sound System, something I hadn’t done in a long time. And oddly I have only just found out there was a Dub Narcotic / Lois Maffeo collaborative EP with a gorgeous lead track, ‘Ship To Shore’. I had no idea it existed, which is strange as Lois’ Butterfly Kiss was a big favourite, with Stuart Moxham’s ultra-minimal production.

I really don’t know much about Yuta Matsumura, but having heard his 2022 Red Ribbon set, which at times to these cloth ears seems at times to have DIY elements of prime OMD, Stranglers, Teardrop Explodes and The Cure, which for me feeds into a track like ‘Enchancity’, a particular favourite from Th Blisks second LP Elixa which was released in 2024 by Efficient Space. And it is here that everything finally fell into place, as I realised that the Melbourne-based Efficient Space label that put out Elixa and reissued How So? was the same imprint that put out the Ali Omar collection and the Hydroplane records mentioned earlier. Well, if you are slow, you are slow, and I am really slow! Getting old, you see.

So, similar to last year in the way after a decade of activity I really got to appreciate International Anthem’s output, so I fell in love belatedly with Efficient Space. Looking at the label’s Bandcamp pages, I realised some of their other releases had also caught my attention, notably the Simple Reality collection of lost recordings by Skeet, put out in 2024 though I confess I only caught up with it on Spotify late last year, presumably as a Hydroplane-related recommendation by my rogue algorithmic Guardian Angel. Skeet being the sound of young Coventry in the early 1980s, Spartan pop adventurers with 2-Tone connections, who didn’t get the chance to release anything back then.

At the risk of being repetitive, my initial mental association was to the Young Marble Giants or The Gist, which is perhaps not entirely coincidental, as Skeet were brothers Gary and Nigel Meffen, wielding a Rickenbacker or two, backed by a drum machine with singer Kay Booth from the local Inferno record shop.

It’s interesting how these lost recordings have been given a new lease of life, in a way not dissimilar to Khartomb’s ‘Swahili Lullaby’. It is tempting to imagine that if the Skeet sound or line-up was fleshed out, they could have become something harsher, closer to the Au Pairs or Flowers. But with the drum machine the sound is closer to, say, the classic ‘Emile (Night Rate)’ by Aural Exciters. The tracks also show the group becoming a lot “more funkier”, a lot more me, with maybe suggestions of things like Maximum Joy’s ‘Stretch’ and 23 Skidoo’s ‘Last Words’ which coincidentally or not feature in a mix by Gary Meffen which was broadcast on NTS in August 2024. There is also on YouTube a wonderful homemade video collage for ‘Brief Call’ which leaves us to wonder might have been.

On the recurring theme of NTS, there have been plenty of consistently great shows from the station’s Melbourne studios, notably by the Otologic team and HTRK. Among the resident hosts in Melbourne is the DJ / producer / singer YL Hooi, who I am slightly relieved to note was mentioned here at YHO in September 2022 in relation to her NTS show and her gorgeously spinechilling cover of Love Joys’ Wackies lovers rock classic ‘Stranger’.

This appears on her excellent and refreshingly hard to pin down Untitled LP, released in 2021 on Efficient Space, though it was originally released as a cassette on Altered States for all of you fellow addicts of connectivity. YL Hooi recently performed in Melbourne as part of the Efficient Space 10^th anniversary celebrations with a live mix by the rightly legendary Mad Professor. To coincide with this Efficient Space put together an excellent mix for NTS of some of the Mad Professor’s more experimental productions which is worth seeking out. Incidentally these celebrations will culminate with a rare live performance by Mike Nock of his soul revivifying ECM classic Ondas . Perfect!

Impressively, there is incredible variety among the releases in Efficient Space’s decade-worth of archives. What I hadn’t realised was that these include a collection of lost pel mel recordings which form the six tracks on Late Late Show. I had no idea this existed until recently, but then again, it was released in June 2023 when I had other more dramatic matters of life-and-death occupying my mind, so that might explain it. And I can sense here a direct spiritual link to the Skeet release.

I really am not sure how well-known pel mel are. I was very late in discovering this particular outfit, one which I now consider to be along with the Go-Betweens the most appealing of the Australian post-punk outfits from the early 1980s. There was a kind of tenuous link between the two groups too, in that Tony Cohen, the producer of Send Me A Lullaby, also was at the controls for pel mel’s records. And I am pretty sure both bands would have shared bills on various occasions. The difference is that pel mel neither made the pilgrimage to London (as far as I know) nor courted the British music press.

They were, nevertheless, an impeccable modern pop outfit, and I have been thinking about them a lot recently. I have a private joke that pel mel were inspired by imports of Manicured Noise singles and based their look on the postcards that came with the ‘Metronome’ single. That is probably far-fetched but you never know. There is certainly common ground in the look and sound. I could also suggest that pel mel were the missing link, initially, between ACR and OMD via the OJs’ ‘Rip It Up’. Coincidentally or not, they were I believe the only home-grown act to release records on the GAP label, which had nothing to do with clothing and a lot to do with releasing Factory and Rough Trade product in Australia.

I find pel mel very intriguing. They were it seems pretty successful in Australia, and there are plenty of clips to watch of them, all of which are wonderful. But I really don’t know much about them. I may be looking in the wrong places but have never seen any in-depth interviews with group members and as far as I know none of their original records (there were 2 LPs and a series of singles) are available on CD or as a vinyl repressing. The group has a Bandcamp page, have played together in recent years, and you can buy a digital collection of their ‘greatest hits’ and some archival live recordings, but apart from this Late Late Show 12” there seems to be nothing in physical form, which is really odd. There may be horribly practical reasons for this, or maybe idealistic ones. I really don’t know.

One gets the impression they were the antithesis of the Birthday Party r’n’r excess. I have come across a passage in a biography of Tony Cohen by Dale Blair which has a passing mention of the group: “Pel Mel was another which he remembered. ‘They were strange. That was a really strange match because they did like…they drank tea! They made quite a good record. It was sort of experimental stuff, sort of little Casio keyboards, little toy keyboards and they’d stop their session at whatever time of day to watch their favourite soap opera, Days of Our Lives or something.”

Tony’s own posthumously published memoir Half Deaf, Completely Mad has a similar passage which Efficient Space shared on social media: “pel mel were nice, clean-living people. They were not so much a rock ‘n’ roll band, more a group of friends who played music together. They would stop recording each afternoon to watch the soap opera Days of Our Lives. I’d seen a lot of strange things in the studio, but that was a first!”

As time went by the pel me sound evolved from its spiky post-punk roots to a far more funky and increasingly glossy sound, albeit without the kind of overdone production that sucked the heart and soul out of so much music as the 1980s progressed. Keyboards gradually came more to the fore, as can be seen in rare live footage of them performing their (hit) single ‘Pandemonium’ in Sydney, late 1983, filmed by a member of The Particles, another great group from that time.

In this clip and in the video for the single charismatic singer Jude McGee is centre stage with her Roland Juno synth. There were a lot of synth-related pop acts in the early 1980s but I am struggling to think of any others that had a female performing a similar role, let alone someone who also played saxophone occasionally. I am probably overlooking something obvious, so please forgive me if this is the case.

One thing I love about pel mel is Jude’s wordsmithery which is strikingly singular and shows a way with words and a love of language. She made very smart use of everyday phrases, used out of context (Edwyn was good at that too in the OJs’ heyday), as demonstrated by song titles like ‘Blind Lead The Blind’, ‘Shoes Should Fit’, ‘Barrel of Laughs’, ‘Pandemonium’ and ‘Mumbo Jumbo’. I suppose it should be no surprise Jude had a subsequent successful career in publishing, unless I have my Judes mixed-up which is always possible.

The six tracks from the mid-1980s that make up the Late Late Show on Efficient Space are appealingly unfinished (though I may be doing them a disservice by saying that) and show a drift towards more electronic elements. There is a refreshing total absence of oppressive orthodox rock features, which I am sure is not coincidental. For me, the two standout tracks are ‘Mr President’ where Jude tries her hand at rapping and ‘Calamity Jane’ which has a bit of a reggae flavour, with some more of Jude’s deft use of familiar phrases like “the rain it raineth everyday, boys and girls go out to play”. And her sax playing on this is wonderful.

One of the delights available on YouTube is the video for pel mel’s 1982 single ‘Shoes Should Fit’, a propulsively funky affair, which fittingly has some of the coolest kids doing their variation on the modern dance which makes sense as it was the era of Tom Tom Club, ESG, Gwen Guthrie, Sharon Redd, Lipps Inc., Liquid Liquid, Loose Joints, Peech Boys, Bush Tetras, Taana Gardner, Rockers Revenge, Bombers, Brother ‘D’ with Collective Effort, Dinosaur L. and so on and so on, which this track sort of fits with. It is a total delight.

And speaking of which, here is footage a few months back of Hydroplane playing live on a Melbourne radio show which opens with a heartbreaking version of 'New Monotonic FM': “I don’t depend on memories. They’re the things I want to deny”. No, no, these aren’t tears. Honest!