A big thank you goes to Steve Lehmann for the music in this film. Steve and I were able to work together to strike the write chord (embrace the double pun - move forward) of the story. He really is fantastic and I hope to work with him again soon. Visit his site here.
Without further ado, here is the film. Best watched in HD if given the option.

LAPSE from Sam Webster on Vimeo.

PHASE: a state of synchronous operation.

The concept behind phase poetry is an audio installation which plots elements of a text against one another, creating loops which challenge the rhythm of the original work, converging and diverging mathematically. The text I used in the experiment is about the multiple avenues of meaning which occurs, branching out from one word, to a sentence, an idea, a novel which can be newly understood again and again by different contexts and cultures…

We began our lives as singular beings, individual words uttered together branching out into multiple meanings slightly divergent, splitting open for stories for poems for breaths (*exhale*) catching each other on the page. There is a poem tugging at my ears nibbling at my neck and struggling towards unity.

The audio is designed to reflect the text, starting in unity and ending split. The inclusion of the breath in the middle piece acts as an audio marker which indicates the distance between the playbacks at any one point. The concept would be to run something like this in a room with four different sound sources (instead of stereo audio), on an hour long loop. Over the course of an hour, phrases will appear to come together, and split.

LISTEN HERE (headphones required): Phase Poem Test 1

The best approach is to let the words wash over you, the phrases themselves are not recreated in the process, so once you have the original text understood, let the sound wash back and forth without trying to find sentence structure in the competing audio streams.The notion is to let go of the lucidity of the text, to mimic the nature of confusion which competing meanings would create.

Technical side:

Each audio stream is made up of one vocal track, and one piano track. These are panned at 100% left, 30% left, 30% right and 100% right, thus creating four different sound sources. Respective to their stereo panning, each track plays back at a different speed: 59beats per minute, 60bpm, 61bpm, 62bpm. At these tempos, it should technically take 1 minute for the slowest and fastest audio streams to be one line out from one another. By the end of that sample, the first and last are there approximately 15 lines apart. That is, the fastest audio stream has overtaken the slowest audio stream entirely.

I’m practically naked from the waist down,
I was hoping you would dress me back up as a doll,
And show me back off to all the patrons,
They are here but they’re barely listening at all.

Practically Wasted (Track 1)

Maclean is delightfully cryptic on what would be an odd-choice of opening track if it weren’t for the catchy pop piano driving through. The Mika-esque melody and innovative lyrics we come to expect from Maclean drive the tune from obscurity into favouritism. His sexuality is rampant and indefinite; we are close enough to hear of debauchery and passion, yet held away from gender-specifics, physical descriptions and any detail which may give past alliances specific personality. Maclean recalls anecdotes as melancholic odes, with an undefined ‘you’ in the shadows, pacing and sweating, then exiting as little more than a silhouette.

But there is love.

Pass me a peg - I’ll still put out your laundry,
Pass you a bandage and tie up my old knee.
It’s not that I’m alone, it’s you’re not here.

Beat Me To It (Track 3)

Maclean is a must-see performer, if only for the honesty he carries in performance. One gets the feeling that this EP is sitting under past lovers doormats, left after nightfall with genuine regret. White Canvas was not designed as a series of tracks, but a small journal of melodic missives. It was not made for my ears, though my guilty voyeurism relishes the honest moments, like the forceful lament of a planned future gone unfaithfully awry. White Canvas is a calculated tether to emotional crests, first pushing us away with the misfortune of “Beat Me To It” and then dragging us back into the optimistic, “Stop”, as if to reiterate the sneaking suspicion we all have that maybe 3 minutes of therapeutic pop is all the happiness we need. I suspect Maclean prefers his cynicism, given that the title track he leaves with calls out to helpless translucency over a dragging rhythm, “I’m no sliding door. If anything, I’m a wall. I’m white on white canvas.”

White Canvas is a small cry in a sea of youthful weakness, a cantata for our cultivated candour. In times of strength, we make demands. We draw breath from each other, our callous words demanding sweat from lover’s pores, grief from lonely hearts. We draw cowering masses under our arms outspread and then we fall, deeper than we were high, into the pit. In times of weakness, we make demands, desperately. For shelter and solace, or simple pleasures in grocery aisles.

We paint ourselves into being, starting with eyeliner and ending with witticisms.

We are drenched in sweat. White on white, we dance, and we dance, and we dance.

Brendan Maclean on MySpace and Twitter

Around 11am today, I bought two DVDs in Myer. At about 1:40pm I went into David Jones to use their bathroom. When I entered the store the alarm went off, employees looked at me like ‘Don’t worry, it always happens.’ After all, I couldn’t be stealing something if I was entering. I went to the bathroom which has a security gate outside it. It beeped. Went to the bathroom, came out, there was a security guard at the gate. It didn’t beep. I kept walking and noticed a security guard walking about 10m in front of me, both their walkie-talkies were alive with chatter.

Guard #1 positioned himself ahead of me at the exit, I was on the phone. I got off when he asked to check my bag. Two DVDs, Two Books, Tic Tacs. He asked to see the DVDs, I showed him. He asked me where I got them. I told him. A second security guard came and checked the DVDs, and my bag. I told them I thought this was a bit much. He asked to see the receipt. I showed him. Since the codes on the receipt were individual sales codes, and not barcodes, they didn’t match the DVDs. He said that I couldn’t prove I had purchased them. (What happened to being innocent until proven guilty?) He asked me to step inside and left me with Guard #1, a small man who looked at me with a small amount of fear (Surely, looking tough should be part of the job description?)

Anyway, over his radio I heard “bring him to the holding room, we’ll deal with it there.” I was on the phone with Marianna who was coming to meet me, and when I got off I told him ‘By the way, I’m not going to any holding room.’ and he quickly backtracked ‘No no no, it’s nothing like that, don’t worry. we just need you to come to the…entertainment section with us” I told him I wasn’t going anywhere. That I was going to wait for my friend, and since I hadn’t done anything wrong, I wasn’t going anywhere for questioning. Guard #2 returns with #3 and #4. #3 stays for about 2 minutes, then leaves. Guard #4 seems to be the head of store security. He is dressed better than the other three guards, about my height but with a bigger build. He tells me to go with him.

“No, I’m going to wait for a friend.”
“They can come and find you.”
“I don’t have to go anywhere.”
“If I think you might have stolen something, I can apprehend you right now.”
“Do you actually believe I’ve stolen something?”
“Yes, I think you might have.”
(Keep in mind, I had receipts…This would be the most crazily planned DVD Heist ever.. I would have to actually spend a certain amount on Myer products and then steal the exact same amount from DJs (the DVDs still had stickers on them))
“Do I LOOK suspicious to you? I’m going to make a call.”
“You can make a call.”
Marianna on the phone said, “Don’t let them touch you.” I directed my response at the guard: “Don’t be silly, they won’t touch me.”

(When retelling this story to Joyeeta, I told her that I wished he had tried to force me towards the ‘holding room’, purely because there are too many security guards who don’t know legally what they can and can’t do to a civilian/customer. Hearsay says there are a few cops who are the same.)

I calle Marianna and stay on with her until she’s basically outside the store, knowing that I would have to argue my point further if I hung up and waited. She arrived and laughed at the security guards. (That’s Marianna… Later she told me that she considered saying “SAM! have you been shoplifting again?” but thought better of it.)

I told the guard that there was no point in me staying. I had receipts and I hadn’t stolen anything. This was a complete waste of time.

He asked if I had anything else on me. I said no. He said “Maybe we could pinpoint the problem” and reached for the collar of my jacket. I pulled away slightly and Marianna said “Or we could just leave.” He said he couldn’t let me do that. Then I realised the one thing they should’ve done straight away is scan the ’stolen goods’ by themselves. Surprise, surprise, they beeped.

Realising, perhaps, how stupid this whole thing was, he made a point of explaining to me the thing we all knew all along. The thing that we established fifteen minutes earlier when I showed them the DVDs, with myer stickers, in a myer bag, with a myer receipt. The thing that I knew as soon as the gates beeped on my entry into David Jones. Sometimes other people’s security tags set off the David Jones gates.

Insightful. Thanks.

Image #1 Courtesy of Daquella manera

Image #2 Courtesy of SeeIt SnapIt

Dew Process/Universal Music Australia

Recorded in Stockholm with all local musicians

Produced by Björn Yttling

As Day Follows Night seems to sum up the lilting feeling of going from day today, soaring through some and falling through others, and accepting the love and atrocity which such a manic existence entails. It is hardly surprising that the opening track feels like Fiona Apple on an old piano, lamenting, “Lately you’ve been down on luck, crying out to the man above. I believe in miracles, but a miracle you can’t control.” “Down On Love” plays as a wilful act of acceptance to the folly of love, flying in the face of the stand-out track at the other end of the spectrum, “Is My Baby Yours?”

I’ve tried so hard, it’s never enough,

You can’t make somebody love you,

while they’re still missing someone one.

Blasko cries out the repetitive bird call, echoing off the walls of a brick wall heart, resonating deeper with each call: Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours? Is my baby yours?

All I know of Stockholm is a boom and rattle, wailing wind, and the quaintness of delicate breath. All I know of the city is the way it cries out from under the wings of Sarah, a weeping in her wilting melody, and a warmth in her flourish.  They say she’s chosen to live in the slithering shadows of momentary shimmers, shivering in the moonlight between ivory and steelstring gut, but I beg to differ. I’ve found her on the street corner and in my grandmother’s jewellery box, I have seen her shining face through frosted train carriage windows, and the hem of her garment floating down Melbourne laneways, as fragile and as sensitive as her singing voice to the wind. As solitary as a city in a memory. As Day Follows Night is a pillow weeping and flushed wrist cry for things lost, and mislaid, and sits melancholy on my shelf between Me’Shell NdegeOcello’s Bitter and Damien Rice’s O.

1. Call it inane and useless new media

2. Refer to the celebrities’ use of it, as if that is its only life-force.

What’s worse is that it is often referred to as inferior to Facebook, because of its supposed mundanity. If that is your line of argument, seriously consider re-reading your friend’s Facebook statuses. There is a reason you find them interesting, but I’ll get to that in a second. Objectively, however, they are just as banal as the worst exponent of Twitter. So, in response to David Dale at the Sydney Morning Herald, quoted below, I have a few thoughts and rhetorical questions for us to consider.

“It was the year when Twitter came and went - a fad formed in February and dropped in December, proof that this is the land of the short attention span… Telling the world everything you’re doing every minute is just not amusing any more. Rose has reached an epiphany: that when you have nothing interesting to say, there is no need to say anything. If Australia’s answer to Paris Hilton decides she couldn’t give a Twit, the rest of the partygoing community cannot be far behind… Rose delivered the death blow.” - Twittering is for boring old farts

Dale then goes on to compare Twitter to a scene from Back to the Future II, where feeds of information spew out from outlets all over the house. He seems to think this is laughable but honestly, in a society where I get my news from my TV, desktop computer, laptop and iPhone, is it really wise to ridicule that information might come from multiple sources?

I won’t even begin to get into the irony of the article itself. I read about it on Twitter, not in the paper. There’s some depth to that beyond the pretentious chuckle it may insight. The depth comes from the fact that if Twitter is this inane stream of pointless information, a trend which has lost its steam, then why is this news? It has been proven time and time again that people not on Twitter are either blindly critical of it, or not interested in the slightest. The piece itself can only exist as a puff piece, because those who care know it is false, and those who don’t care, what’s the point?

For those who are not involved, the inputs to your twitter feed (or, in a friendlier way, people you choose to follow) are chosen by you. If you choose boring people who tweet nothing but breakfast, you will get nothing but breakfast. Criticism of this aspect is like turning on the cooking channel and complaining that no-one is covering the war in Iraq. The reasons someone is worth following on twitter come down to one basic fact: Do you care what they have to say? It is for this reason that I don’t follow Ruby Rose, nor care about whether she has left the site. To quote her departure as being a sign of the death of Twitter is like saying Morning Television is done with now that Bert Newton has retired. I love Bert, but are we really so naive to turn around and say that an entire form of communication is characterised by the involvement of its most famous players? If so, I fear for the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s mortality when they lose Richard Tognetti and who knows what’s going to happen when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs retire? I guess we’ll go back to pen and paper. To drive the point further home, when have you EVER opened a newspaper and found every article interesting to you on an individual level? What is it again about people in glass houses?

For those journalists about to write an article about the death (or even the triumph) of twitter, here’s a tip. If you come into it as an eavesdropper you will find no value. Twitter is a conversation between many people who choose to interact. In addition, it is a news source which is customisable. Additionally, if what you have to say is worth saying, you will gain more followers who CHOOSE to follow you. My favourite blog is abduzeedo, a wonderful design collection online which publishes links to new articles through twitter. They would not get a space in old media, yet with Twitter, I am able to follow them. This is the beauty of the medium, the customisable interaction between sources of news, be they friends or major outlets. At the end of the day, the only solid argument against community newsfeeds is that of credibility. To be honest, the majority of people could hear a story on the news, but if their best friend told them a different version, they’d probably go with theirs. It’s nice to consider that everybody believes what they hear because of ‘reputation’ but to be honest, if reputation has told me anything it’s ‘don’t believe The Telegraph because of bias’ and now, ‘don’t believe The Herald because of anachronism.’ You may not agree with me, and if you don’t, you don’t have to; THAT is the beauty of where we’re at.

There are other reasons to follow someone but here are the two that matter:

1. They provide quality material which interests you.

2. They provide material which interests you because of the source.

News outlets tend to fall into the former, while celebrities and friends fall into the latter. From the outside, they may seem to be inane. If you don’t want to know how to mount a wireless strobe from a ceiling fan, Strobist (twitter.com/strobist) might not be for you. If you don’t care what my friend Shitika (twitter.com/shitika) is writing about on her blog, her feed might not be for you. And hey, if I want to know what my best friend is doing this morning and you don’t, maybe that’s okay? Are we really going to compare her tweets with that of the Sydney Morning Herald?

What I’m trying to say is, just because Twitter has a function which may exceed that of typical news broadcasts, does not make the whole thing inane. If we really want to go down that path, we should definitely be pulling down Channel 9 for Two and a Half Men, and with the new clean feed coming, Channel Ten won’t be far behind after the Big Brother incident. Why, because something is so new do we feel it should be destined to fail? Do we even remember the internet in its first public year?

To be perfectly honest, this kind of thinking is quite imperialistic. Thinking that you know better than the people who are involved, that without the latest TV deity, the media will fail, and then deciding that the quality of interaction cannot be high if YOU are not a part, is the kind of old-school thinking which keeps the future of Rupert Murdoch’s empire laughable.

It should be known I originally found my brownie recipe at CSR, and have altered it slightly after testing.

Double Choc Fudge Brownies

Makes 20 pieces (each is pretty rich though)
250g dark chocolate melts or chips
2 cups Caster Sugar (can be up to 2 1/2 if you like it sweet)
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
3/4 cup plain flour
1/4 cup self raising flour
1/2 cup cocoa
extra 125g dark chocolate melts chopped or chocolate chips
Icing Sugar to decorate (optional)

Personally, I prefer the larger chocolate melts, as opposed to the smaller drops or chips, which I will explain later. Preheat the oven to 160°C (150 fan forced). Paper line a 20 x 30cm tin. Melt the first measure of chocolate. Beat the Caster Sugar, eggs and vanila in a food processor or with a hand-held mixer (the mixture isn’t too thick so a wooden spoon will do). Add the melted chocolate, flours and cocoa.

That’s your basic mixture, now you stir in the extra (unmelted) chocolate. Because this doesn’t go in the main mixture, and melts during the cooking process instead, what you end up with is little pockets of melted chocolate throughout. This is why the bigger melts are better, because once you cut up the pieces, you want each one to have a few decent sized chocolate gooey bits.

Pour entire mixture into the tin, spread out to fill and bake for 50 minutes until firm. If you cook them for 40-45 minutes they will be slightly chewier (which I prefer) but you have to keep an eye on it to make sure you get the right consistency.

Cool in the tin and cut into small bars or chunks. Store in an airtight container. Dust with Icing Sugar and serve.

Bottle Blondes

As the name suggests, Bottle Blondes use white chocolate, coconut and milo to replace the dark chocolate, and cocoa. White chocolate drinking powder would probably also work instead of milo, for a lighter colour. To keep the consistency, I used slightly more flour also. Bottle Blondes are a great alternative for people who aren’t into really rich chocolate, they have a coconut base to their flavour and taste a little more like a slice than a brownie.

250g white chocolate melts
2 cups Caster Sugar
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 cup plain flour
1/4 cup self raising flour
1/2 cup milo
1/2 cup dessicated coconutextra 125g white chocolate melts
Icing Sugar to decorate (optional)

Preheat the oven to 160°C (150 fan forced). Paper line a 20 x 30cm tin. Melt the first measure of chocolate. Beat the Caster Sugar, eggs and vanila in a food processor or with a hand-held mixer (the mixture isn’t too thick so a wooden spoon will do). Add the melted chocolate, flours, milo and coconut.

That’s your basic mixture, now you stir in the extra (unmelted) chocolate. Because this doesn’t go in the main mixture, and melts during the cooking process instead, what you end up with is little pockets of melted chocolate throughout.

Pour entire mixture into the tin, spread out to fill and bake for 50 minutes until firm. If you cook them for 40-45 minutes they will be slightly chewier (which I prefer) but you have to keep an eye on it to make sure you get the right consistency.

Cool in the tin and cut into small bars or chunks. Store in an airtight container. Dust with Icing Sugar and serve.

DEAD LETTER CHORUS

Dead Letter Chorus started in 2006 with five Sydney musicians from local bands coming together to form a new side project. Lead singer/songwriter Cameron Potts recalls spending the trip to Splendour in the Grass listening to demos he had “roughed up” at uni when he should have been studying the counterpoint of Bach preludes and fugues. The band spent the journey deconstructing the tracks and “when [they] got back [they] put it back together and started rehearsing.”

Cameron and fellow debutante Gabrielle Huber front the band, alongside drummer Lee Carey, bassist Andrew Rose and guitarist Mike Faber. But with so much personality, and two lead singers, are there power dynamics behind the scenes? Potts says that “all the relationships in the band are pretty close but we’re not precious about anything so it doesn’t really affect any dynamic. We write songs separately but are always interested in each other’s opinions and suggestions. We don’t really have main influences and we are not trying to sound like any type of band. We listen to a lot of different music all the time. It’s other people [who tell us that we sound like such-and-such a band] when maybe we realise and say ‘Oh yeah, that does sound a little like said band.’”

The Dead Letter Chorus sound varies from track to track, echoing like a folk record in an abandoned rail yard one minute and dancing through the vineyard the next (”Kill the King” and “Magnolia Farm” to give examples) but through it all there is the thread of authenticity, like they are ever willing to tell you the bone-truth about themselves, and smile while they do it. Potts seems to agree, adding his name to the register of bands out there who are drawn to the joy of performance, rather than worrying about the market. “The music scene is a myth. There is no one way to approach it. We just do what we do, play shows, get out name out there, and hope for the best.”

The Interview

As I wait for Gabrielle, I look out the window of Glebe’s Well Connected cafe and watch the light beginning to fade to orange against the sides of the residential buildings. The street outside has just been repaved so the area is quieter than it has been in weeks, though the in house speaker system is projecting a rather intrusive mix of half tracks, skipped at the whim of cafe staff working downstairs. She arrives with a smile, dressed in a dark casual dress and orders coffee, then sits with one leg folded underneath.
She says, “I know, I always sit strangely in these seats” and I wonder whether she realises I have imagined this entire scene as a 1930s crime fiction thriller. I can’t be blamed, her songs made me do it.
“I have a list of questions to ask, but they all sound pretentious now that I read them back.” I confess, wishing that I was the person who could chew a cigar purely as an affectation.
“Oh, I want to hear them!” she says, calm and intelligent.

For the next two hours we work our way through the regularities of interviewing, stopping to lament the price of Leonard Cohen tickets, the exact location of Miranda, and the way in which Sydney seems to engulf any suburb between Wollongong and Newcastle for its greedy self.

Firstly, could you tell us about the song writing experience within Dead Letter Chorus?

Song writing is actually a difficult process for me because I’m a perfectionist down to a tee. I don’t know if it’s the curse of being a Virgo or just…me. I’ve been writing songs for about two years, since the band started, and being a pianist it’s funny because I can’t actually write on piano. I can write an instrumental but I can never seem to add lyrics to a piano piece. I only write on guitar. I’m the type of person that will get an idea and I’ll work on it for a few weeks and then I’ll be like, “It’s crap, It’s crap, It’s so stupid, I’m not even going to play it for Cameron” and then two months down the track I’ll bring it out again and I’ll just keep working on it until I find it’s possibly a finished song and I’ll play it for the band and they’ll say, “That’s alright, you know?” and I’ll be like “Really?”

You’ve said elsewhere that you one of the interesting parts of creating The August Magnificent was building your own home studio. Did you specifically want to do this one on your own, or was it just easier that way?

We wanted to feel really comfortable in a space where we weren’t looking at the clock 24/7 and thinking “Oh my God, it’s going to cost us $200 if we do another take of drums in this section”. We didn’t want to feel rushed. With our EP it was the complete opposite, we were in a studio and we did six tracks in one day. We were really tight and we’d rehearsed enough so we could just go in and nail it but with this album we wanted it to be completely different. If we did a vocal take one day and it wasn’t ‘right’, we could be like “OK, well maybe today’s not the day, tomorrow will be a new day and we’ll do it again.’ With this album we just wanted it to be really organic and we didn’t want it to be rushed or anything like that.

So where does a band living in Sydney fit a recording studio?

It’s in our manager’s house. He’d been wanting to build a studio for years. Literally, Cameron and him were nailing things and I was painting. I was “Team Ambiance”, so I was in charge of fairy lights and painting and frames and all that kind of stuff” It was really good to have that kind of relaxed vibe…We are very much a live band, we’re not really ‘recording artists’, and we wanted it to still sound real and earthy, not overproduced or anything.

The production of the album has that sort of ‘honest’ quality to it, even in the more poppy numbers… but it’s certainly an epic release. Was it a matter of the songs just getting bigger in the studio day by day?

We always wanted it to be a big deal. We knew we wanted a choir. Cameron and I had written Horn parts or String parts. We knew that we wanted it to sound big and polyphonic on certain songs and we knew we had the time for that, because we weren’t under studio time.

Speaking of the two of you, one of the difficulties of writing about Dead Letter Chorus is it’s hard to designate a lead singer. There’s a great duality to the way you guys work together. That is, it never feels like Cameron is just ‘giving you a song here and there.’

It’s more evident in our live performance because Cameron is the front man. I sing just as much but I don’t say very much, mainly because I think there has to be one person that’s leading the band, to interact with the crowd and stuff. If too many people talk on stage, it’s too distracting and I, most of the time, don’t have anything to say anyway, so I’ll just giggle a bit and that’s it!

On the recording, the songs really seem to suit whichever of you is behind the microphone. For example, The Long Goodnight paints this fantastic scene of a femme fatale, left behind in the rain, I really can’t imagine it being sung by anyone else.

Yeah that’s a very feminine song. Though, Cameron had a demo of that and it was quite masculine. It was a bit faster, all acoustic guitar and very rhythmically driven, but with our recording version of it has the strings, and the reverbed vocal and all that… With those songs, I just made them my own in terms of the melody. I changed the melody to suit me. I think those songs are quite feminine in a sense, like the melody is quite ‘floaty’, you know?

Having two singers seems to solidify the self-consciousness of the album, rather than love songs to unseen muses in the wings, it’s almost like the album has to confront things because there’s both a male and a female presence.
That’s a really cool way of seeing it because I think that’s the way we see it as well. It’s like a journey, it’s about us and our relationships as a band as well, and I think you can feel that in the arrangements, especially in 11^th Dream, like it’s slowly building and then it’s craziness…

That’s a tumultuous song!

Haha, it’s intense isn’t it? That song had the most tracks, so many guitars and vocals and strings and horns and percussion… I remember the first time we ever played Fight The Morning was at [Sydney’s] Manning Bar earlier this year. It was so intense performing that, I felt like I was going to pass out. It was just such an intense song and the melody was intense… Our songs really demand a lot from us.

Yeah, I feel like ‘Wow, I’ve gotta be engaged for this…’

I think half of the album can’t be listened to just in the car, driving or whatever. Some of the songs you have to sit down at home with a glass of wine, turn it up and really listen to it. Even when I heard it after it was mixed and all that, it was really different for me, even though I had performed and written some of the songs. I really had to listen, you just see these little inflections that you didn’t think would come through.

Lyrically, it’s quite complex as well. Because the images are so important, especially 11^th Dream about Aeroplanes. It’s like line by line, you’re kind of being ripped to shreds.

It’s really up and down, it’s a journey in itself that song. Cameron writes really nice love songs and that song he actually had ten dreams (over ten nights) about being in a plane crash, and he died in all of those dreams. And on the eleventh night, he had the same dream but they saved each other. It’s just about being strong together.

It sums up that idea of absolute tragedy coming out of love.

My mum, when she listens to the album, she’s like: ‘Cameron writes a lot about death, is that normal?’ and I think he’s actually writing it in an appreciation of life more so by looking at it from the other end. He’s always had vivid dreams about death and stuff, but I think it’s because he loves life so much; he’s a vivacious person.

THE ALBUM

The August Magnificent

1. The Peaceful Sleep Of Death
2. Magnolia Farm
3. Down In Your Valley
4. Chasing Hearts
5. Fight The Morning
6. Oscar Moland
7. 11th Dream About Aeroplanes
8. The Long Goodnight
9. Modern Faith
10. Silly Little Man / Kill The King
11. Misery’s Widow
12. Fathers and Daughters

As music reviewers, we often find ourselves drawn towards cliché, the tried and proven phrases we’ve used for album after album, the empty levity of musical comparison.
“Shall it be Dylan, Radiohead or Buckley today?” we muse to ourselves.
Luckily for us, we are not reviewed for our reviews nor criticised for our critique. The same cannot be said for those who we subject to our opinionated correspondence. No, they must avoid cliché so that we don’t pull them up on it.

Dead Letter Chorus’ debut album avoids cliché through their clever appropriation of musical antiquity. To speak of The August Magnificent without mentioning the sheer beauty of its folk nostalgia would be a shame given an album of this standard. It drives us out to Magnolia Farm and then leaves us on the porch, with a shovel and broken bucket, to find our way home in the rain. The album shines in the cracks between table manners and historical debris, with a song writing style which is quaint and honest. Gabrielle, the sweet femme fatale of this film noir fairytale, draws us in with her sweet and worn melodic lines while Cameron Potts tugs us down from the clouds to gaze forever at the bare paths we’ve worn in the sand.

I watched you walk into the bar that night.
I knew exactly where you were going,
where everyone seemed to be going,
without me.
(The Long Goodnight)

As the opening lines of “The Long Goodnight” lilt over a subtle waltz, we begin to wonder, is the true August Magnificent life or love? Or perhaps both?

Many of the songs lean towards the feeling that we are intruding on personal correspondence between two war torn lovers, an intrusion which clashes with the very honest nature of the song. When I first heard “Misery’s Widow”, I made a note to let Gabrielle know during the interview how much I loved the song, and how much I would hate for it to be about me. On the other hand, my favourite track on The August Magnificent, “11^th Dream About Aeroplanes” I would take as my lover’s ode any day, the ethereal concoction of fragmentary images makes for a lover’s dream which is disconcerting but comforting. It extrapolates on an idea not dissimilar to Milan Kundera’s Identity, the feeling that love is strong enough to make you fear the very thought of losing it.

I looked to the sky, and I outlined the moon,
It was a soundwave and it was breakin’ in two
Well I felt the end and it was comin’ soon, my love.
(11^th Dream about Aeroplanes)

I wish I could take you to coffee and explain to you with wild gesticulations just why this album is a breath of fresh air, but you are just a reader. You don’t want my sporadic outbursts. You are a reader, a dear reader, but only that.

I’ll be at Magnolia Farm, I hope you’ll join me.

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