Efficient Space News

Efficient Space continues to bind its mind with Altered States Tapes, offering another service to How So?, Th Blisks' 2022 debut in home-cooked experimentation. A blurring of three vastly different heads into a single disjointed, but fluid organism, How So? finds Yuta Matsumura (The Lewers, Keanu Nelson), Amelia Besseny (Troth, Impatiens) and Cooper Bowman (Troth, CD3) working with vocals, melodica, deeply pulled samples, guitar, drum machine, synths and resourceful percussion. An Elixa-blueprint of sideways ambient rituals, fog-thick melodica dub and paranoid trip hop by way of Sydney's pioneering industrial collagists, the LP recirculates beyond its original 150-copy confines for those who missed its first apparition.

Syncretic marks the debut full-length from Australian duo Bhairavi Raman, a Western and Carnatic violinist, and Nanthesh Sivarajah, a mridangam player and versatile percussionist. Both artists share a Tamil heritage, a current that hums across the album. Raman, from South India, and Sivarajah, from Sri Lanka, draw lines that connect Western practice and Carnatic tradition. This hybrid is central to Raman’s approach as a violinist, an instrument itself caught between East and West since the late 18th century. Her playing folds history, lineage and experimentation into music that acknowledges inheritance while gently rewiring its circuitry.

Expanding on traditional music can be a precarious practice, but Syncretic never feels heavy-handed. Raman and Sivarajah exercise measured restraint, letting the Carnatic framework breathe even as it is refracted through contemporary tools. Delays, looping, subtle layering and synthesized harmonies tilt tradition into a new light without disguising it.

Even within a contemporary framework, Raman’s rigorous Carnatic training under gurus Sri S. Varadarajan (India), Sri Murali Kumar (Australia) and Sri Gopinath Iyer (Australia) is unmistakable. She captures the spiritual and emotional essence of each raga: on Seven, the playful raga Bahudari becomes both centrepiece and conduit, while on the traditional piece Thunbam Nergayil, drawn from a Tamil poem, we hear a deeply personal iteration, a weeping euphony of mixed emotions hitting all at once. Tradition here is absorbed, expanded and reframed.

Sivarajah’s command of the mridangam, honed by his gurus Sri Jambunathan (Sri Lanka), Sri Balasri Rasiah (Australia) and Sri T. R. Sundaresan (India), is central to his original composition Guardian. He sustains tradition while extending it through layering and sound-spatialisation. The mridangam here functions as both a structural and ornamental force, mapping continuity between inherited form and contemporary sonic architecture.

Syncretic resonates as a space where Tamil heritage, diasporic memory and contemporary practice coalesce. Culture, like sound, circulates, transforms and persists. Tradition is not an archive but living material, a soundworld that lingers in the ears and the imagination.

Reintroducing Soar - the alias of Christian Aebi, serial DIY taper and one-man orchestra from Langenthal, a fog-shrouded town in the Swiss provinces. Krautophobia, ambient lo-fi agriculture, analogue soul balm and slowspeed psych gelati-blitz cardboard pop only gesture towards the sound world he coaxed from his broken Tascam four-track recorder, in attics, churches, junkyards and at the kitchen table.

The spark for Soar was likely time and space, somewhere in the autumn of 1994. Armed with a cable salad of Sixties guitar/bass, fairground drums, mould-speckled organs and toy instruments, Aebi coaxed five albums, an unverified run of 25 cassettes, and a handful of gigs. Mostly issued through Zurich label Corazoo, the records arrived in hand-pasted sleeves, rough-cut reproductions of his teddy bear-fixated artwork that carried the same imperfect immediacy as the music. With Rudi Steiner, performances in galleries, clubs and halls bent into live sound-image happenings - part installation, part film, part flea-market-instrument theatre - invariably leaving the house engineers bewildered.

At the time of his untimely death in 2021, Aebi remained a village secret, his music passed quietly between friends and local ears. Now, Swiss graphic designer and Ghost Riders compiler Ivan Liechti has pieced together a portrait from the afterglow, gathering tangled audio formats, paintings, illustrations, photographs and notebooks with his family, former label and peers. What emerges is a first glimpse of Soar's intimate cosmos - brushing against Füxa, Spectrum, Dump, Stereolab and King Crimson, but orbiting a dimension entirely his own.

A Place In My Memory Is All I Have To Claim is the new album by Australian atmospheric pop trio Hydroplane, the storied 'offshoot' formed by three quarters of independent pop group, The Cat's Miaow. On this, their first music after two decades plus of radio silence, Andrew Withycombe, Kerrie Bolton and Bart Cummings return to the gentle, close-quarters musical world they shared around the turn of the century.

Recorded during 2024 in Melbourne and Ballarat, A Place In My Memory… picks up the thread Hydroplane set down with its precursor, 2001's The Sound Of Changing Places, though you can hear echoes of their other releases, too, with Withycombe noting a through-line from the group's 1998 "Failed Adventure" single. There's little quite like A Place In My Memory…, then or now, though. Maybe you can draw some connections between Hydroplane and their sister group, The Cat's Miaow, while fellow travellers might include Empress, The Ah Club, and further back, Young Marble Giants, Veronique Vincent (the muffled, ticking drum machine also makes me think of Robin Gibb's Robin's Reign).

There's also an umbilical to the bedroom-crafted electronica doing the rounds in the late nineties and early noughties. Hydroplane hint at this through their approach to songwriting, which often builds creatively around loops as structural devices. Through all this, the trio achieve an effortless, organic weightlessness across these nine lovely songs. Many feature Bolton's clear singing voice, drifting along, while guitars, keyboards, drum machines and loops tickertape away. The constituent parts fit together, but they also have a curiously detached quality - think of abstract cloud formations sharing the same sky.

Hydroplane and The Cat's Miaow often dealt in emotional ambiguity and uncertainty, and the uncertainty of the nostalgic. This was always one of the most appealing facets of their music, and A Place In My Memory… is thus named perfectly. I couldn't dream up a better title for the album and its reflections on history, lived experience, and the inevitable tangle between these two phenomena. These reflections variously address such concerns as human cruelty, flight, space travel, adventurism and spiritualism. There's also "To the Lighthouse", not a direct reference to the Virginia Woolf book, but a great title, nonetheless. (They've always had excellent titles, often borrowed, for songs and albums.)

A beautiful collection of drowsy, sleepy pop, humble and quiet, but resolute in its craft, A Place In My Memory Is All I Have To Claim is dream work in practice; a lovely reintroduction. Welcome back, then.

2025 Repress


Australian music devotees András and Instant Peterson hold a candle to overlooked avant-pop and electronic works by antipodean artists and outsiders working through the 80s and 90s. Through co-presenting weekly radio show Strange Holiday, the duo slowly upturned their locale for inspiration - archives, country bookstores, private collections and convenience stores, searching for a place to anchor their own identities in the oceans of the island continent. The 10 tracks acknowledge a minor history, passed on via a network of friends, friends of friends, the libraries of radio station 3RRR and more often than not, the artists themselves. Renowned mixed media artist Maria Kozic enters with the mysterious downbeat of Trust Me, her husband Philip Brophy responsible for digital and analogue sonic construction. A recurring character in András and Instant Peterson's investigations, Brophy reappears with a score piece from his divisive feature film Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat, recorded as (pronounced 'Tch Tch Tch"). Other links are thread under the surface. Melbourne inner north experimentalist David Chesworth explores his Australiana songcraft leading Whadya Want. The short lived project also featured Philip Jackson, whose husband-wife duo The Couch is restored from Fast Forward's dance issue - a pioneering cassette fanzine published by early-80s 3RRR personality Bruce Milne.

Efficient Space honours trailblazing Australian imprint Volition Records with Volition Cuts Vol. 1. Evolving from Andrew Penhallow’s time at GAP Records, which smuggled Cabaret Voltaire, The Fall and the Factory catalogue into the region, Volition shifted focus to homegrown talent over imported sounds. Echoing its precursor’s blend of indie friction and electronic curiosity, the label wired itself into the pulse of club and rave culture, linking city scenes and amplifying them for the mainstream. With retina-scorching design, uncompromising packaging and top-tier remixes, Volition consistently bent the major label machine to its will.

No Volition retrospective would be complete without Sisters Underground’s intergenerational anthem ‘In the Neighbourhood’. Otara teenagers Brenda Makamoeafi and Hassanah Iroegbu brought their Pasifika perspective to Proud (An Urban-Pacific Streetsoul Compilation), a commercial success that platformed NZ rap and R&B with a clarity that outshone its overseas counterparts. The quiet architect of Volition’s sound, producer prodigy Robert Racic flipped the classic as a hip-house dub before his untimely passing in 1996.

Its A-side companion comes from Brisbane synth-pop unit Boxcar, who signed to Volition after frontman Dave Smith handed a cassette to Tom Ellard of Severed Heads during a school newspaper interview. That unlikely handoff led to their 1990 debut Vertigo. Here, their ritual-laced, body-jacking industrial is retooled by Miami freestyle maverick Tony Garcia.

Further cherry-picking from the VOLT vaults, Sexing The Cherry unleash a bleep-addled meltdown from Brisbane’s Edwin Morrow and Cherryn Lomas. ‘This Is A Dream’ was recorded exclusively for High (A Dance Compilation), the first all-Australian V/A to top the ARIA charts, propelling the local movement into national consciousness.

Closing the sampler, Sydney’s Single Gun Theory joined Volition as they moved from post-punk abstraction and electronic collage toward downtempo, sample-based mysticism. Their 1994 ambient-pop reverie ‘Fall’ is reimagined by Stuart Crichton and Apollo 440’s Norman Fisher-Jones as full-throttle Goa trance, a final surge that channels the label’s relentless push into new terrain.

Volition Cuts Vol. 1 is dedicated to the loving memory of Volition’s visionary founder Andrew Penhallow, and key contributors Robert Racic and Edwin Morrow.1

Efficient Space charts Ghost Riders’ North American roadmap, crashing into 1973 New York to ignite the unfiltered teen dreams of Dennis Harte.

In the late ’60s, 11-year-old prodigy Dennis Harte was handed a Sears-bought Silvertone 1448, its in-case amplifier primed for street-level incantations. Recruiting two neighbourhood friends, the trio hammered out raw rhythms, drawing in Brooklyn’s wandering bohemians, keen to glimpse a prepubescent Alex Chilton in the making.

Also jamming with his older brothers, Bart and John, a family friend introduced the siblings to budding music exec Carl Edelson, who had spent the better part of two decades hustling through a string of local labels. A father figure of sorts, Edelson backed them immediately, facilitating sessions at the famed A-1 Sound Studios and Sanders Recording Studio and pressing four 7”s on his newly minted Roundtable Records. To maximise his chances of courting major labels, he strategically assigned each release a different artist name - Dennis Harte, Pure Madness, Harte Brothers and the wryly titled Harte Attack.

Dennis’ emotional maturity and sheer talent bleed into the defining ‘Summer’s Over’, penned by Edelson and once recorded by mid-'60s New Jersey garage vocal group The Wouldsmen. Morphing into an unfathomably teenage, blue-eyed soul/psych lament, it aches for a season slipping away forever. Its Harte Attack edition counterpart - the candied ballad ‘Running Thru My Mind’ - delivers unison harmonies and kinetic guitar interplay with a streetwise punch, channeling the spirit of NYC-area icons The Rascals, The Lovin’ Spoonful, and The Youngbloods.

Roaring like the Spencer Davis Group, Pure Madness’ organ-driven bruiser ‘Freedom Rides’ screams of biker gangs, yet its true subject - ’60s civil rights activists the Freedom Riders - looms as another towering theme for an adolescent perspective. Meanwhile, the loose, bluesy ruckus ‘Treat Me Like a Man’ digs back into Edelson’s catalogue, covering the Beatles-inflected Levittown group The Shandels.

Though Dennis later found success touring with Wilson Pickett and now doubles as a piano tuner to the stars, these four snapshots frame ambition on its outer edge - a heartfelt homage to an unbreakable brotherhood.

Luritja artist Keanu Nelson traces the afterglow of Wilurarrakutu with a two-track 7”, cut from the same home-studio haze with producer Yuta Matsumura. The pair continue their singular weave of community-rooted storytelling and elemental electronics, shaped with the gear at hand.

Hints of YouTube hip-hop and emotionally charged piano ripple through ‘Place Where I Go’, a dubbed-out reflection on the daily realities of life in Papunya, Nelson’s desert home. ‘Kapi Ngalyananni’ finds Nelson singing in language, a mesmeric water song bridging the personal and ancestral, with elevating chords, clapsticks, and Matsumura’s parched melodica lines.

These remote dispatches carry a vital new voice from the heart of the desert, where tradition and sonic experimentation delicately converge.

2025 repress

Wilson Tanner come to shore with a new album of floating melodies, lightly salted. Throwing electroacoustic conventions overboard, Andrew Wilson (Andras) and John Tanner (Eleventeen Eston) recorded this new work aboard a 1950s riverboat with a resourceful array of weatherproof electronic instruments and a long extension lead. These eight compositions pull in a by-catch of maritime folklore; of Siren and Selkie, Seagull and engine oil slick. A change of course from their debut album 69 (Growing Bin Records, 2016), the ambient temperature drops as II casts out to sea in uncertain weather and returns to the safe harbours of Port Phillip Bay.

The seafarers head out to My Gull's poised optimism. The birds watch but do they listen? By the arrival of Loch and Key, the shoreline has dissolved completely, the boat floating in serene infinity as the rest of the world spins. Conditions soon take a treacherous turn on Killcord Pts I-III - a 12 minute odyssey that battens down the hatches as these sailors eye merciless waves and blinding ocean spray, jointly channelling Berlin-school electronics and sea legs. In the aftermath, the waterlogged bleeps of Idle survey the damage as our parched crew sound the distress signal and ultimately descend into delirium.

Known for navigating individual courses as solo musicians, Wilson and Tanner's collective storytelling is saturated in detail, buoying between tension and harmony. II modestly stands as some of both artists' most accomplished material.

Wilson Tanner return to dry land with Legends, a wine-soaked agricultural fantasy, made among the grapevines at Manon Farm in South Australia. Where their earlier works settled into the sun-struck torpor of a suburban Perth backyard (69) or drifted off-course on a riverboat on Port Phillip Bay (ii), Legends trades salt air for vineyard sweat, the scrape of boots on dry earth and workers’ radios humming with the summer test cricket season.

Through this agricultural haze an image of a working vineyard emerges - ducks, dogs and plovers intrude; tractors and quads fly-by; stainless steel gleams at the edges. Recorded without mains power, the Manon demos overflow with farmyard ingenuity. Wind, brass, balalaika, balloon, pipe and synth are trained onto the staff with wire, tape and string.

A caricature of Australian viticulture, Legends is packed to the horns with the mythology and manure of natural wine. Swigging and belching in camaraderie, Wilson Tanner press their surroundings into something raw and unfiltered, letting bum notes, leftovers and sediment linger in the bottle. A cornucopia of biodynamic sounds.

2025 Repress

Searchlight Moonbeam is the new narrative compilation from Time Is Away (Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney) whose eponymous monthly NTS Radio shows, tinctured fusions of fugitive sounds and reverie-inducing archival speech, have won them an ardent following. It follows from the London-based duo’s Ballads, a remarkable driftwerk released on A Colourful Storm in 2022.


Searchlight Moonbeam is an autumnal dreamscape, intimate and vespertine, pensive and irresolute. An imagined community where differences drop off and resonances emerge – between Maher Shalal Hash Baz affiliates Kasumi Trio, Taiwanese score composer Chen Ming Chang whose ‘Rainwater’ (written for Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1986 film Dust In The Wind) is exquisitely heartbroken, and the plangent improvisations of self-taught French pianist Delphine Dora.


Revelations are frequent: the bedsit isolationism of Bo Harwood and John Cassavetes’ ‘No One Around to Hear It’ (from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie); the narked minimalism of Klang (an early 2000s band formed by ex-Elastica guitarist and featuring prize-winning experimental novelist Isabel Waidner on bass); the etude-grooves and echoic wobble of below-the-radar French avant-gardists Omertà ; the beautiful, plaintively dubby ‘Is It You?’ by Slapp Happy; a psych-tinged reimagining of PiL’s ‘Poptones’ by Simon Fisher Turner (one half of Deux Filles, and here, recording for él as The King of Luxembourg) that's as perverse as the cover of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats.


Searchlight Moonbeam is the musical analog of an Italo Calvino novel or a medieval fable. Associative, intuitive, borderless. Emotional and mysterious. Endowed with the tactility of Braille. A private language that is both unknowable and understood. It is a record of the seasons, for the seasons.

2023 marks the tenth anniversary of Time Is Away’s first broadcast. Featuring an evocative essay by writer Jeremy Atherton Lin and disarming cover art by Penny Davenport, Searchlight Moonbeam showcases Rollo and Tierney’s still-unrivalled talent for gloaming melodies, disques du crépuscule, ensorcelled storytelling.

2025 Repress

"Hydroplane reinstate their formidable 1997 debut of sublime guitar atmospherics, fragile lyricism and droning incidentals with an overdue vinyl and digital reissue.

An offshoot of the now-féted The Cat’s Miaow, the trio formed after drummer Cameron Smith decamped to London, charting new territory with tape loops, manipulated samples and a borrowed Jupiter 4 in the wake of Endtroducing. Adopting a handle that Dean Wareham once considered calling Luna, Hydroplane intended to only ever release Excerpts From Forthcoming LP, a single-sided 7” sonic collage, before imploding in mystery. Their label however insisted they deliver their taunted album. From the comfort of a Brunswick flat, they continued to record soaring melodies and restrained song structures to 4-track, sculpting dramatic Radiophonic Workshop cues weighted in reverb and near-perfect dream pop lead by Kerrie Bolton’s empyrean vocals.

Bored of industry expectation and largely ignored by local audiences, the reluctant performers followed the way of The Cannanes and formed meaningful overseas alliances by mail and phone, securing releases on Michigan outpost Drive-In and Broadcast launching pad Wurlitzer Jukebox. Championed by John Peel with twenty spins on his converted Radio One slot and even polling in Festive Fifty of 1997, the humble three-piece still walked to their neighbourhood shops undetected.

Pierre Bujeau is an expert at creating temporary escape zones—musical structures to evade the everyday. Sometimes he works collectively as part of the mysterious French groups Omertà and Tanz Mein Herz. But it’s when he’s on his own, performing as Megabasse, that he offers the most complete break from reality. His kit is simple: a few bottles of cheap lager, twin Fender amps, and his double-necked guitar. An instrument like this normally signals maximum rockist excess—think Jimmy Page, Geddy Lee, or that dude from the Eagles. In Pierre’s hands, it becomes more like a zither or a dulcimer, producing soft chiming patterns that build against themselves until the sound of the room, passed back and forth between his two amps, starts to blur everything, and we are away in another world. Wait, though—let down your yoga bun and don’t light the palo santo yet. The new space he creates has nothing to do with smug wellness. It’s a rough, do-it-yourself psychedelia, scuffed but hopeful. Not a perfect blank space to be your best self in, but instead a communal dreaming, an uncanny place where all are welcome.

Until now, without catching him live, the Megabasse experience has been difficult to find: CD-Rs, short-run tapes, and one blink-and-you-missed-it LP. Thankfully, this record on Efficient Space, a reissue of some pieces that were previously only available on a small cassette edition, will put that right. Here are two long, intricate pieces, and something new—a shorter track that hints at a move toward beautiful, burnt-out guitar soli.

Unless you are very lucky, wise, or rich, life imposes its structures on you. Maybe a record of shimmering, tranced guitar is all you need to get out from underneath?

Efficient Space honours the memory of producer and MC Ali Omar with Hashish Hits, a posthumous selection from the dub rebel’s self-released discography.

One of ten children in working-class Liverpool, Omar drew deep influence from his father's Arabic heritage—a thread central to his identity and sample origins. After art school and a spell clubbing during Manchester's halcyon days, he relocated to Sydney, where he cofounded the blunted downbeat duo Atone with fellow British expatriate Andy Fitzgerald. As an MC, he infiltrated the city’s house, dub, jungle, and bass circuits, becoming a regular fixture at the Bentley Bar, where he commanded the mic with his versatile, rumbling baritone and charisma.

Freakishly talented in the studio, Omar was a pioneer of the Akai sampler and Atari, deftly recording live sessions straight to DAT. Drawing on industry insights from his sister, Merseybeat firebrand Beryl Marsden—who supported The Beatles on their final UK tour and was signed to Decca and Columbia—the non-conformist sought to build a self-sufficient business model. Between 1998 and 2004, he independently issued four albums on CD through his Hashish Studios imprint, hustling copies directly to local record stores and live shows for instant returns, even hand-sewing screen-printed hessian sleeves for his final release.

Uncompromising in his principles and refusing to suffer fools or charlatans, Omar relished the opportunity to collaborate with those who embodied the same spirit. Hashish Hits offers a snapshot of his inner sanctum—Fitzgerald on the opening track's billowing smoke stacks, the serpentine vocals of Gina Mitchell and the magic hands of mixer Louis Mitchell on 'On Release,' and Wicked Beat Sound System’s Kye on 'Poor Man Beggar Man Thief'. Meanwhile, 'Suicide Bomber' smoulders with the tension of a lost Muslimgauze relic, as the instructional 'Roll Up' and 'The Last Straw' spiral deeper into Omar’s signature production vortex— where space stretches in slow motion and walls reverberate with ricocheting delay.

A true icon of Sydney’s underground scene, the larger-than-life Omar passed away on 23 June 2009 after a valiant battle with cancer. He is remembered for his assertive spirit, larrikin humour, wild anarchic personality, and enduring mantra: “Love and live your life”.1

2024 Repress

Wilson Tanner’s 69 returns to Australian soil for a new season. A uniquely provincial take on ambient music, Andrew Wilson (Andras) and John Tanner (Eleventeen Eston) assembled their prized debut over a shared love of seafood, wine and LPG. Recorded in a Perth backyard, these two new friends reached for the tools at hand and made the best of the fine weather. Instrument and implement combine in a languorous bricolage of synthesizer, clarinet and building materials - interrupted only by the occasional flutter of pigeon wings or a call to lunch. Back in print for the first time since 2017, Wilson Tanner hop into Efficient Space’s expanding pot.

Simple Reality cements the short lived legacy of Coventry DIY group Skeet.

Emerging from a scene of first-generation punks and 2 Tone kids, Skeet was instigated by Gary and Nigel Meffen in 1981, fusing tightrope instrumentals with a Roland CR-8000 under the glow of projected visuals. After a cassette of their debut performance found its way to Kay Booth who worked at Inferno Records, the unsuspecting frontwoman took the liberty of adding her own vocals. Instantly embraced as a permanent member, Booth’s shy delivery and open-diary expressions of social alienation and romantic rejection hovered over the brothers’ scratchy guitar and agitated bass.

Playing as few as 10 shows, their unnerving minimalism was recorded in a suburban home studio, borrowing a reel-to-reel from Toby Lyons (The Colourfield) and a mixer from Jerry Dammers (The Specials). Record labels gestured interest until one day they were no more - no arguments, no official split, just a silent parting of the ways and three people taking journeys in different directions. Unheard and unloved in the vaults for nearly four decades, 'Brief Call' finally resurfaced via the Coventry Music Museum compendium Alternative Sounds Volume 1, followed by a micro pressing of the full suite on Chris Long’s Almost Unknown imprint in 2023.

Simple Reality now offers a definitive snapshot of these must-hear neurotic post-punks. Mastered by Skeet fanatic Mikey Young, newly discovered instrumental multitracks are restored alongside a live recording of their final stand. Performed atop of a trailer in a pub beer garden, the release-worthy desk tape adds three new tracks and a more energised swing at ‘Left On the Shelf’s apathetic techno-pop.

RIYL: Fire Engines, 23 Skidoo, A Certain Ratio, Young Marble Giants, pel mel

Efficient Space welcomes Th Blisks to the fold with their mutant strain of melodica dub, torched hip hop breaks, post-punk and procession song.

Th Blisks' members have many notches on their collective belt. Amelia Besseny and Altered States Tapes’ founder Cooper Bowman are prolific in their ritualistic ambient-pop duo Troth, while Yuta Matsumura holds a formidable Sydney punk band pedigree on top of his Low Company-backed solo work. A reward for those who took the time to dig it out, Th Blisks’ 2022 debut How So? was a DIY creation that fully embraced its outsider roots, revelling in opportunities for connection through pop flourishes. Feeling like it might have been a one-off, we proclaim their return with Elixa.

With an unseen clarity of vision, Elixa conjures its meticulously fleshed out world. Those familiar pieces are all there - the mystery, the patience, a cheeky pop hook - however this time there's an intentionality to it all. A blurred dialogue stretching across Australia, it was largely recorded remotely with tracks bouncing between Bowman and Besseny in Muloobinba (Newcastle) and Nipaluna (Hobart), and Matsumura stationed in Warumpi (Papunya). Every element is carefully considered, stemming from their individual time spent as lifers in the local DIY scenes. Through these tracks you can feel that history; echoes of Castings and Vincent Over The Sink in ‘Do You Bless It?’, Bowman's distinctive submerged tape loops gurgling away under boom bap and *that* Sydney guitar tone in ‘Esk’.

Elixa attempts to bottle some pinged-eye wonder at the magic surrounding, whether in the city or the bush. Informed by the old but drug into The New, it is a begrudgingly current Australien record that respectively nods at the UK’s sound history.

A humanity-reminding suite of miracle moments, Someone Like Me unites a geographically unbound cast of real people in pursuit of a meaningful connection. Taping their lived experience in economic studios in quiet English counties, Pacific Northwest woodland retreats and the big city bustle of Sydney and Los Angeles, these kindred spirits rendered sheer beauty in the process. Custom pressed folk songs of love, loss and the lord saviour.

Illuminating minor works from seasoned players such as former Syndicate Of Sound chart-topper Sharkey and late-era Canned Heat lynchpin James Thornbury, the collection simultaneously honours the fleeting amateurism of hobby musicians. With their one shot at tangible vinyl, freshman Lynne Ann Kingan realised her loose bubblegum rocker on campus time, while U.S. Navy recruit Fred Potts cut his unconditionally serene ballad remotely stationed on a Spanish naval base. Spartan production continues to reign with Jon Betmead’s hair-raising gospel, howling into infinite space, and Goldrust’s stripped back garden hymn.

Throughout the hour-long reflection, faith has an intermittent yet revelatory presence, most overtly with the divine choral soul of Seventh-day Adventist quartet Remnant. More subtly, Gary Ramey and Jim Kennedy both turned to song in their spiritual quests, offering their all to a universal power. An irrefutable compilation cornerstone, the National Office For Black Catholics showcased Charles Murphy’s lionhearted account of the Black experience at a 1971 concert. Five years earlier, high school seniors The Superwomen would use their hauntingly angelic harmonies to address racial inequity with a breathless take on ‘Lowlands’.

Reaching the furthest corners, Someone Like Me secures the inaugural licence of three homespun masterpieces. Discovered by fluke in the digital haystacks of Youtube and Soundcloud, Jim Huxley’s bedroom pop earworm melds peacefully into Charlie Webster’s synthesized reverie. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s John Agostino introduces us to the bizarre world of tax scam records, with the artist only now learning that his tender psych-folk demos were leaked via a 1977 bootleg.

Compiled and lovingly restored by armchair digger Mikey Young (Eddy Current Suppression Ring/The Green Child), Someone Like Me pays due service to seventeen rarefied journals of truth and devotion. Adorned with visual artist Chris Fallon’s figure and flora dream extractions, the uniting songbook is further detailed by expansive track-by-track liner notes and a forward from San Franciscan poet Rod Roland.

Spurred on by emergent footage of a recent live performance, Efficient Space delves deeper into the world of Spanish shoegaze outfit Bélver Yin, now solely helmed by founding member Pedro L. Orte-ga. An intimate collection of new recordings, Para Mi Madre is a parting gift to his mother, fulfilling a promise made in her final days.

Bélver Yin’s story begins at the turn of the ‘90s, blooming from a fixation with British ethereal alt-pop (Cocteau Twins, The Chameleons, The Cure et al.). Utilising guitar, bass and drum machine rhythms to record the cathartic 1991 debut Luz Bel, their quintessentially Mediterranean angle on slow, reverb and echo-laden atmospherics found a home on fleeting label Noisex Music. Despite radio play and con-certs around Spain, lack of distribution led to the album being largely overlooked, until Efficient Space’s faithful reissue in 2020.

With this newfound interest stoking Ortega’s fire, the wealth and strength of Para Mi Madre’s expres-sive impulses will woo fans and newcomers alike. Patiently moving from pastel hues, sepia-tones and balearic nostalgia, its crystallised instrumentals give a knowing nod to the wide-eyed possibilities of youthful summers as much as they do world-weary respite. Not wallowing in gloom, the deeply per-sonal and spirit-stirring memorandum documents Ortega coming to terms with the loss of his greatest champion.

After a ten year pursuit, Efficient Space finally presents Late, Late Show, the last recordings of influential Sydney-via-Newcastle band pel mel. Taped in the mid-’80s, these charmingly unvarnished sessions pare the combo back to their core, producing blue-collar sophisti-pop to a danceable LinnDrum beat. From the funky disco-not-disco of ‘Mr President’ to the effortless pop perfection of ‘Fool’s House’, the six tracks reveal a creatively open and well-oiled pel mel before they inevitably disbanded.

Formed in early 1979 as a misfit sextet from steel and surf town Newcastle, pel mel were inspired by New York and UK’s post-punk imports. Cutting their teeth speeding through originals and Joy Division, Wire and The Buzzcocks covers every Friday night to a regular turnout of dole bludgers, students and the under-age, the band would also cross-pollinate with electronic-leaning support act The Limp. In 1980, they decamped to Sydney to join the city’s flourishing alternative music scene alongside the likes of Laughing Clowns, Tactics, The Reels, Wild West and the M Squared crew, making an indelible mark with two albums and several singles as the only domestic signee of Factory’s Australasian licensee GAP Records. Catchy and intelligently experimental without being noisy, their musicianship and enduring legacy continues to be lauded by peers.

Undoubtedly some of their strongest output, this previously unreleased demo suite documents pel mel free from the pressures of a commercial outcome, naturally elevating them to a class alongside Orange Juice, Antena and Young Marble Giants.

2023 REpress
A North American road trip of coming of age garage soul mapped by Ivan Liechti, Ghost Riders is Efficient Space’s latest narrative compilation, hovering in a liminal emotional ravine between moonlight melancholy, teenage heartache and unchecked, unrealised ambition. Across seventeen open hearted ballads recorded 1965-1974, the 2LP collects and connects dots between British Invasion fanatics, child prodigies, the loners and the luckless, in a kind of trans-continental survey of those swept up in rock’n’roll mania and buoyed by local newspaper ads promising fame and gold records.

From the tangerine dreams of 8th grade all-girl combo The Mod 4 to the tri-state jukebox aspiring echoes of The Tempters, The Yardley’s poetic Farfisa vamp and lilting folk pop, and The Landlords’ weepy break up b-side blues, these are mostly one shots by dreamers whose experience was brief before being checked back to the reality of suburban normality and realistic career options. Hailing from the regional backwaters of Illnois, Arkansas, Nevada, Massachussets, Ohio, Idaho, Texas and beyond, the licensed artists were scouted by way of local fire departments, spiritualist fellowships and animal welfare centres, often barely a stones throw from where their contributions were originally laid.

A barely teenage Dennis Harte's ‘Summer’s Over’ perhaps best taps the collection’s essence. A gut-wrenching lament of the passing of the season as if it was the last on earth. Flanked by players from The Left Banke, Harte, a now-piano tuner to the stars, is from the minor segment that found longevity in showbiz. Likewise with Michigan icon Lyn Nowicki who cast her ghostly voice over Beatles cover song chameleons The Common People and Jerry McGee, The Ventures member and conduit of Dr. John’s ‘Twilight Zone’.

Ghost Riders simmers with the scent of youthful summers, the pang of schoolyard romance, and the excitement (and disenchantment) of teenage naïveté, delivered via a deceptively simple and frequently wonky garage band set up. The vision of record collector and graphic designer Ivan Liechti, these eternal psych-folk howlers are further crystallised by Colin Young’s fastidious audio restoration, the original artwork of Elise Ganebin-de Bons and an aptly penned forward from Sonic Boom.

Tresa Leigh is the reflection of St. Simons Island, Georgia teenager Teresa Laxamanna (né Leggett).

Wooed by a classifieds listing to audition for Philly funk and soul imprint Lyndell Records, the aspiring 15 year old dragged her father, guitar, fender amplifier and microphone to perform her convincingly mature folk tales of first time heartbreak. Winning the support of label owner Walter L Rayfield, the fresh recruit cut two originals in a makeshift motel studio on the neighbouring Jekyll Island, backed by a band of unhurried session players. The 1970 recording yielded her debut 45, pairing I Remember’s endearing juvenile jangle with the heartsick Ghost Riders cornerstone Until Then.

After a car accident prevented Mr. Rayfield from fulfilling his release plans, an unswayed Tresa responded to Great World Of Sound’s newspaper advert, baiting the prospect of gold records, major label connections and sales of a million copies. With family and friends crowdfunding the $1,200 that the company required to produce a follow-up 7”, she jetted to Nashville, recording a slicker, emotionally elevated update on Until Then, and the symphonic slow dancer I Miss You. In another unfortunate career misfire, the dubious label failed to deliver on any of their promises, with the artist volunteering the only surviving copy for restoration.

Collating all four recordings, this brief anthology immortalises the innocent small town dreams of a genuine original, inadvertently echoing the likes of Nora Guthrie, Bonnie Dobson and Patti Whipp.

A double shot of Y2K digi thrillers from Sydney via Bromley electro-dub producer Jeff Dread. Part of the city’s burgeoning network of blunted bass and sound system culture, Dread worked in parallel with the likes of Sheriff Lindo, Andy Rantzen and Ali Omar, issuing two dynamite albums on Creative Vibes in 1999 and 2001.

Utilising the Atari 1020 Ste, Dread would frantically live mix up to 9 tracks direct to CD-R, echoing the same rough and ready low tech intuition as Jamaican trailblazers King Tubby, Scientist and Jack Ruby and their UK-based disciples Jah Shaka, Adrian Sherwood and Mad Professor. While unmarked discs of his indulgently durational sessions litter the archives, this plate showcases versions immortalised by two crucial compilation CDs. Wicked stepper ‘Dub The Farmer’s Daughter’ burrows the ear canal with its addictive melodica and tightly coiled acid synth lines, edited for high impact by Sheriff Lindo for his volume of Dub For the Masses (Dread would curate its successor), while ‘Out On A Limb’ hails from Just Is, a double album sequenced by legendary Sydney queer party crew Club Kooky. A bass bin creeper that was extended with horns for his second longplayer Return From Alpha One, it’s this unembellished work in progress that really stings.

With Dread’s allegiance to local sound system heavyweights Firehouse, these totally brained studio jams are tried and tested weapons, finally blasting on the sacred 7” format.

Sky Girl is a mysteriously unshakeable companion, a deeply melancholic and sentimental journey through folk-pop, new wave and art music micro presses that span 1961-1991. A seemingly disparate suite of selections of forgotten fables by more or less neverknowns, Sky Girl forms a beautifully coherent and utterly sublime whole deftly compiled by French collectors DJ Sundae and Julien Dechery. From Scott Seskind's adolescent musical road movie to Karen Marks' icy Oz-wave, the charming DIY storytelling of Italian-American go-getter Joe Tossini and the ethereal slow dance themes of Parisian artists Nini Raviolette and Hugo Weris, Sky Girl resonates on a wide spectrum historically, geographically and stylistically. It unites in a singular, longing, almost intangible ambience.

Crossing over to Adelaide, odd wave minor players The Frenzied Bricks completely bypassed the history books with indifference. This madcap union of school friends Chris Merchant and David McCarthy cut void-entering motorik and weirdo monologues in bedrooms and suburban rehearsal studios. Rumoured to be an individual, they never bothered to disprove the gossip with live perfor-mance. They did however submit aspiring demos to community radio station 5MMM, where they were fortuitously stored for four decades.

The 7” marks the non-band’s debut release, combining two should-be classics from the vault. ‘(Can I) Bridge The Gap’ apathetically tunnels with Neu! Order energy, dual bass and McCarthy’s laconic vocal delivery, while their only instrumental ‘Entropy’ calls in guitarist and unofficial Brick Dave Warren to send the TR-808 into the stratosphere. Unknown until now, this is down under synth-wave at it’s fin-est.

The Frenzied Bricks is pressed in an edition of 300 hand stamped white labels, wrapped in white ink printed coloured card.

Height/Dismay were the M Squared studio-as-instrument duo of Patrick Gibson and Dru Jones. A member of Systematics and Scattered Order, Gibson was an integral part of the M Squared label and studio, where he met Jones. With an unapologetic misuse of instruments and ample time, the two sonic explorers scraped guitar strings, manipulated clarinets, and contact mic’d woks to layer their echo chamber apparitions.

Collating three 1981 recordings, the then-shelved ‘Blood Pressure In The Sand’ joins ‘Dusk’, their con-tribution to archetypal cassette-zine Fast Forward. Also unreleased, ‘The Tinning Test’ rejects formal lyrics in favour of a deadpan reading from the Australian Standard for tinned copper wire. The outsid-ers of the outside, these mutual minds’ productions have long been overlooked as crucial pieces of the Australian DIY music puzzle.

Height/Dismay is pressed in an edition of 300 hand stamped white labels, wrapped in white ink print-ed coloured card.

Efficient Space presents Soft and Fragile by Ros Bandt and LIME (Live Improvised Music Events), originally released by Move Records in 1983. A pioneering figure in Australian music, Bandt is known for her work with sound sculpture, electronics, acoustic ecology, and invented instruments, as well as her writings and teaching.

Soft and Fragile comprises a series of structured improvisations performed on custom-built bells and gongs. On the side-long ‘Ocean Bells’, Bandt performs on her ‘flagong’, a three-tiered vertical glass marimba that she made in 1978, inspired by the ‘cloud chamber bowls’ of maverick instrument builder and microtonal composer Harry Partch. Over a long tape loop made up of slowed down sounds from the same instrument, she delicately strikes the glass bells with mallets, allowing individual pitch-es to ring out and decay with the aquatic wavering quality that suggested the piece’s title, eventually building into flowing melodic sequences. Structured as a series of events determined by the length of the performer’s breath, this gently undulating music invites listeners to lose themselves in delicate microtonal fluctuations and subtle yet expressive phrasing.

For ‘Shifts’, Bandt is joined by Julie Doyle, Gavan McCarthy, and Carolyn Robb on a collectively composed work for clay bells. Atop a steady pulse, melodic and rhythmic cells expand and contract, shifting between LIME’s four members. LIME also perform the closing ‘Annapurna’, where timbres sourced from glass, clay and metal are freely threaded through a pulsating tape backdrop generated from loops of the ensemble chanting.

Presented in a redesigned sleeve showcasing the performers and their instruments, the reissue repro-duces the extensive original liner notes. While Bandt’s ideas and techniques draw on aspects of the invented instrument tradition of Partch and Bertoia, Stockhausen’s intuitive music, and the cyclical structures of American minimalism and Javanese gamelan, the floating world of Soft and Fragile also resonates with the work of New Age outlier Stephan Micus and contemporary practitioners such as Tomoko Sauvage. In Bandt’s own words, this is ‘elegant and sensual music where the body and mind have the time to reflect and catch up with the moment as it passes…It is a music intended for res-pite’.

Oz Echoes peels away another layer of Australia's '80s DIY hive mind. The Oz Waves successor exposes a deeper circuit of micro-run cassettes, community radio archives and irrationally abandoned studio sessions, as Steele Bonus sequences a 10-track compendium of drone pop, psyche-electronics and agitated tape cut-ups.

From the Sydney cassette network, The Horse He's Sick returns with an industrial car crash, alongside Wrong Kind of Stone Age's pagan cacophony and primal riddims. M Squared dynamo Patrick Gibson appears in both Height/Dismay and Mr Knott, his respective studio-as-an-instrument collaborations with Dru Jones (Scattered Order) and ex-Slugfucker Gordon Renouf - the former's worn out apparition hails from an instantly deleted 1981 7", while Mr Knott entrust one of the compilation's five previously unreleased tracks.

Matt Mawson represents Brisbane music media-printed matter collective ZIP, as Adelaide's Three D Radio grants access to their vaults of live-to-air recordings and aspiring demo submissions, rescuing the slap-happy punk-funk of The Frenzied Bricks and Jandy Rainbow's prodigious beginnings in Les Trois Etrangers and Aeroplane Footsteps. Synchronously in Melbourne, Ash Wednesday (Karen Marks, The Metronomes) leads Modern Jazz' improvised proto-techno and EBM pioneers Shanghai Au Go-Go home record their sardonic synth-wave.

A cherry-picked cast of unusual suspects, Oz Echoes' unfamed artist and non-band narratives are detailed by track-by-track liner notes with rarely published archival visions and artwork from Video Synth, prompting further rabbit hole ventures into this golden era of creative risk-taking and instant action.

Turned on by a new dawn of chemical love, Sydney dance-funk combo Bellydance laid down their sampledelica blueprint in 1991, thinking in parallel with Weatherall's revelatory work with Primal Scream. A candy flip of streetsoul, festival jam band and Chip Monck's cautionary brown acid address, 3 Days Man! was primed for open fields and discotheques, in an age when the deejay was royalty.

With an elastic lineup that boasted up to 9 members, Bellydance synchronised more with the club scene than the city's straight-ahead pub rock racket, naturally recruiting hometown heroes Peewee and John Ferris to remix their multi-track concoction. A certified party closing anthem, the brother's sun-smacked breakbeats elevate a collective consciousness beyond the clouds.

Originally issued on Regular Records sub-label Boomshanka Music as a precursor to their album One Blood, the now sought-after 12" sports characteristic artwork from Mambo visionary and Mental As Anything co-founder Reg Mombassa. Instigated by Sydney selector Ben Fester, this Efficient Space reboot arrives fashionably late to Woodstock's 50th anniversary but just in time to help soothe universal division.

Bélver Yin's soul mining odysseys have been unjustly overlooked for three decades. An anomaly in the Spanish alt-pop scene, their forlorn instrumentals and ethereal romanticism would have struck a chord in the British league of Felt, The Chameleons, Cocteau Twins and Dif Juz, leaving their 1991 debut Luz Bel deserving of reappraisal.

While coining their band name from a Jesús Ferrero novel and quoting Laozi philosophy on album sleeves, Bélver Yin create illuminating textures that unlock a wordless language of memory and adolescent emotion. Formed in Salamanca by self-taught musicians Pedro Ortega Sánchez and José María Martín, the guitar-bass duo spent two years crafting their divine interplay with interim drummers before submitting a demo to Noisex Music, their only attempt at label courting. The phone rang mere days later with owner and producer Bernar Marks (The Dust Sessions) offering to cut an album and the band ventured to Valencia with cloud-touching optimism soon after.

Championed by local press, the release fell short of expectation, fueling the mythology of a vanished band known only to the initiated. Varying lineups would, however, continue to work in the shadows under Pedro's direction, recording two spatially arranged follow-ups at their own pace in 1996 and 2005.

A glorious debut that undeniably set a high watermark, Luz Bel is finally available again, faithfully remastered by Mikey Young and featuring bilingual liner notes from John Gómez, the authoritative ear behind Outro Tempo.

Almost four decades since it’s domestic release, Karen Marks’ 1981 single Cold Café has finally reaped it’s deserved international credit to become one of Australia’s most recognised minimal wave recordings. Efficient Space now showcases the Melbourne artist’s brief but entire discography, including two previously unheard demos, all produced with experimental synthesist Ash Wednesday (The Metronomes, Modern Jazz, Thealonian Music). A rarity in the then male dominated industry, Marks found her footing in music, first through rock journalism and then in band management. Formally of Adelaide, newly arrived synth-punks JAB (Johnny Crash, Ash Wednesday and Bodhan X) approached her for representation, subsequently contributing tracks to seminal 1978 snapshot Lethal Weapons and playing the Crystal Ballroom’s opening night. Wednesday and Crash would soon dissolve JAB, enlisting Mark Ferry and Sean Kelly to create Models. Still under Mark’s management, Models became one of the fastest rising new bands of the punk movement, playing to full houses of dedicated and frenzied fans everywhere. Sadly, internal frictions forced Wednesday and Marks to leave after two years, with Crash following three months later. Her creative relationship with Wednesday fortified with the co-production of his 1980 machine-pop prank Love By Numbers, her swooning chorus uplifting his deadpan count to 100, before the two collaborated on Marks’ own recording persona. Immortalised by the icy Oz wave of Cold Café, her Astor issued 7″ also boasted the caffeinated flip Won’t Wear It For Long - a should be hit with guitar from future Icehouse member Robert Kretschmer.

Le Raccourci is a welcome introduction to the world of modern classical identity Sebastian Gandera. The impressionist landscapes of a sensitive soul self-reflecting, these miniature compositions alternate across a rudimentary set up of piano, field recorder, sampler and four track. Melancholic utterings hastily captured some 100km east of Paris. Classically trained by the same teacher as his parents, Gandera first began recording in the confines of his university dorm room, inspired by a C60 from friend and future collaborator Bernard Odot (A Gethsémani). Humbly existing without sparing a thought to music industry or career, Gandera's personal effects surfaced via the European and US cassette networks from 1988 to 1994. Impressively accomplished for the DIY scene they orbited, these tapes were issued in scant quantities, rendering his pieces as private secrets shared and duplicated in small concentric circles. Aside from a sole, avowedly traumatic performance, the material was never shared in a live context.

Efficient Space is honoured to share the little-heard recordings of three Yolngu songmen from Northeast Arnhem Land - Bobby Bunnungurr, Jimmy Djamunba and Peter Milaynga (d. 2007) - working in collaboration with Victorian musician Peter Mumme. Yolngu are the indigenous peoples of Arnhem Land in Northern Territory, Australia; their clans are the Marangu and Malabirr, the languages Djinang and Gannalbingu. Their songs are of instruction, story and ceremony.

A connection first initiated by Yolngu actor David Gulpilil, Waak Waak Djungi's mid-90s recordings were preceded by years of respectful sharing of culture. Mumme explains that 'the aim was to produce something that is new, not in the sense of a breakthrough, but what emerges from the combining of existing ideas'. What developed was sonically unique - sprawling vocal/electronic soundscapes and field recordings that reimagine the traditional songs of black crows and white cockatoos, sharing, creation spirits and of leaving and returning home to country. Spacious and patiently durational, the songs resound in a big land with a big story to tell.

On the 1997 Waak Waak Djungi album Crow Fire Music, these interpretations were assembled with traditional recordings and additional material from Sebastian Jörgensen and Sally Grice. Falling short of generating public interest, it became well known in the Yolngu homeland. Nearly two decades later, a CD copy filed away in the 3RRR FM library would prompt a three year investigation to meet the people behind the music.

Waak Waak ga Min Min (Black Crow, White Cockatoo) combines the previously unreleased Gandi Bawong with five contemporary versions from the original album, with a new cover painting by Bobby Bunnungurr. Tracing 1997 back to many millennia ago, this is a captivating window into the richness of Aboriginal culture and collaboration.