7" - edition of 327 hand stamped white labels, wrapped in white ink printed coloured card.
Efficient Space's Oz Echoes compilation from last year was a neat shorthand introduction to the vast and mostly inaccessible Australian cassette underground of the 80s, and with these latest highly limited 7"s they venture further outwards/downwards into those lost spaces. Australia may have its own interior history, but its electronic music tends to adhere to the same trusted precepts of its European counterparts - shadowy duos built around the dichotomous synthpop adage that if you're not 'ebullient' then you must be 'dystopian'. Because they're Australian, both Height/Dismay and The Frenzied Bricks take that formula and spin it into their own sharply sardonic shapes. The former featured Patrick Gibson from the brilliant Scattered Order and were connected to the now legendary M Squared label (Australia's equivalent of, say, Top Tape, perhaps?), though never released anything during their lifetime due to pressing problems. The three tracks here draw one from that shelved M Squared 7" and two lost to time tracks, skeletal and sometimes abrasive minimal wave defined by Dru Jones deadpan vocals, the final track in particular a memorable skronky Flying Lizards styled pop culture critiquing experiment. Somehow, The Frenzied Bricks are even more obscure, discovered after forty years unreleased in the archive of community radio, 5MMM. There's an anglophile quality to these two tracks, caught somewhere between New Order's Movement, The Lives of Angels and those flawless early Modern Art tracks. In fact, the dual bass drive of (Can I) Bridge The Gap twins perfectly with the latter's iconic Hello/Goodbye. Not much higher praise round these parts. Crucial transmissions from the alterna-pop past no doubt.
