Troth - Idle Easel

Following the release of their Forget the Curse LP back in, what, Feburary (?), and a rarities collection via Discreet a month or so later, Troth close-out a productive year with this latest EP-cum-mini-album for Digital Regress. The making of Idle Easel also coincided with some personal upheaval, the duo relocating from Newcastle, a place in which they'd cemented deep creative foundations via Altered States connection with the local underground, for the equally off-grid environs of Hobart, Tasmania. No surprise that the music they make continues to feel both centreless and drifting, here six vaporous sighs with little in the way of discernible start, middle and end - they curiously seem to arrive halfway in plumes of smoke, floating along on Amelia Besseny's ghostly coo, a glossolalia for lost souls floating just out of reach of comprehension. The words may be hard to get at, but the feeling is clear as a bell, rolling waves of melancholy that align the ambient pastoralism of Virginia Astley, the dreampop otherliness of AC Marias and the subtle grey-toned sonic inflections of the same trip-hop influences that underscored some of Forget the Curse. They're clearly hitting a creative sweet spot right now, almost as if their geographic dislocation has further sharpened a sense of self and outsider status, while at the same time reinforcing a shared worldview that stretches across the international underground, from Tara Clerkin Trio to Thomas Bush through to Carla dal Forno and Yuta Matsumura. More secret understandings sent from the margins.