Cassette
Surprise and fairly limited live document of the great Warm Currency, recorded on home soil at the turn of the year. It was only yesterday i was listening to Great Southern Lands' extremely thorough Matthew P. Hopkins special on NTS, wondering what called for such a niche undertaking (if ever a reason was needed) and what was coming next. Consider the emergence of this tape either manifest destiny or plain good luck. Unsurprisingly for a new group, the eight track set list broadly follows that of Returns, their debut 10" from last year, swapping out a couple for some previously unheard. If that record was a lo-fi, ghostly affair, plugging directly into that enviable lineage of free-form Antipodean experimental folk music (ala Garbage and the Flowers, Love Chants, Alastair Galbraith, Peter Jefferies et al), then Live at the Petersham Bowling Club is an even more close-quarters communique. Pianos creak, guitars gently but ominously spider, and hushed voices quietly implore, the feeling more of a seance than your standard gig environ, as if your witness to some clandestine gathering of otherly intentions. Up close and in person i'm sure it's just as magic, but at a distance, there's something especially magnetic and mysterious to these recordings, trapped in limbo, generating their own enchanted liminal spaces.
