Suburban Cracked Collective - Swimming Amongst The Dregs

The ever-reliable/lovable A Colourful Storm wrap the year up with the latest from Shaun Leacy's Suburban Cracked Collective, a nuanced set of introverted post-noise electronics that channels the best of the current Australian underground while forming its own distinct micro-universe. References to Kallista Kult are somewhat inevitable given they share the same label and country of origin, though SCC is more blurred, favouring the impressionism of musique concrete/sound design over KK's more dubwise orientation. We've talked here before of how experimental/DIY electronic music of the past year or two has increasingly tended towards a more obvious pastoralism (an unconscious two finger salute to the hypercapitalist digital world?), and Leacy's real strength lies in how he ties his abstracted and fractured noise to an almost folk-sensibility, the strange exhalations of melodicas, tumbling percussion and whirring synths evidence of the people in the room. This is expressed most brilliantly on album centrepiece, 'Thousand Year Old Heart', where, across its eight+ minutes, the palimpsest of various unknown sounds build an intimate and inviting space that draws the listener ever closer. In this way, it reminded me of the People Skills album we've loved so much this year. This isn't so much world-building as creating a home, one in which the whole house is breathing, and you breath with it. Downhome, downtempo and in another world. Magic stuff.