Warm Currency - Petals

The Australian duo of MP Hopkins and Mary MacDougall return to Horn of Plenty with their most substantial offering to date. Petals makes it clear that, instantly engaging as they were, the 10" mini-album and live cassette that first introduced us to their haunted folk incantations were really only scratching the surface of the sound world they've imagined into being as Warm Currency. Comprised mostly of gently played acoustic guitars, sometimes-sung-sometimes-spoken vocals, creaking strings and the lo-fi hiss of in-the-room ambiance, the music is often pretty in ways that belie an unignorable sense of unease. This is determinedly not Big City sounding music, more the kind you might find radiating with a deep orange glow from within a wooden cabin stumbled across by chance in some mapless wander through the unknown backwoods. Australia is not just a long way away, but vast enough to engender a kind of internal remoteness also, to hide parts of itself within itself. Warm Currency are a synecdoche for this kind of Australia, a ghostly, tricky to parse presence alive under the accepted map of the land. You'll hear remnants of this same idea within Maths Balance Volumes, Dadamah and Movietone, none of whom are Australian but all of which emit a similar alien otherness that speaks to the parts unknown. Not certain it's something you can ever truly familiarise yourself with, but the wonder lies in trying.