Static Cleaner Lost Reward - Breathing Under Honey

Low Company finally call time on their sordid misadventures with a last ever release that sees them return to long-term associate Tarquin Manek, for what is ironically enough his first work under the Static Cleaner Lost Reward name. Old beginnings/new endings and so forth. LC, as label and shop, and Blackest Ever Black before it, have both been instrumental outlets in helping reconfigure how we hear new manifestations of post-punk-inspired DIY music making, which makes Breathing Under Honey a fitting conclusion, its off-centre fusing of weirdo pop, dubwise dynamics and playful electronics a typically atypical expression of the kind of self-determining autodidactism that's come to define large aspects of the international underground. Manek, for his part, has a significant history himself, helping shape a lot of Australia's best recent exports via his contributions to/associations with Carla dal Forno, F Ingers, Kallista Kult, YL Hooi et al, and he continues that hot streak here by indulging all sorts of sonic detours and left turns. This is outsider pop at it's inverted best, displaying a strong sense of having dug around in dusty crates with a heavy bend towards the outsider 80s (Windows, Vivien Goldman, Dark Day, John Bender, Flaming Tunes++) while weaving its own rabbit-hole potted path. If there's anything else on Low Company it calls to mind it's the great Red Ribbon record by Yuta Matsumura, another alterna-pop vision unafraid to stand in its own light. Don't be sad this the last you're hearing from Low Company, but happy it was ever there in the first place. It is, after all, better to have loved and lost than be the loneliest twat in the land.