J - My Seat and Weep

Debut LP from Melbourne's Justin Cantrell's simply abbreviated J project offers another outlet for him to explore the ambient textures he's mostly known for producing as one half of picnic and an alternative reflection of contemporary Australian experimental music. The recently issued Wound Without a Tear comp on Daisart, who also release picnic of course, probably provides the best context for approaching My Seat and Weep with its historical look at Australian artists working with minimal/ambient electronics (there seems to be a knowing reference to this through the titling of final track, A Healing Tear, as if saying there's a tradition of this kind of music beyond the accepted canon...?). Cantrell's appeal is his marrying of the acoustic with the electronic, delayed piano tones, cello and the ocassional human voice held in the amber of bubbling static and softly layered drones, and what are likely field recordings (rain, passing traffic?) offering the thread of real-world narrative. Like with, say American peers Huerco S or Claire Rousay, there's an obvious emotional quality to the track naming which provides the structure of an impressionistic world beyond the pretty, mediative sound. There's emotional depths to plunge down that way, if we'd only we would. It's more evidence that Australia, in its remoteness, is cultivating plentiful space for both experimentation and world-building approaches to sound.