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.
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Wilurarrakutu is the brilliant debut from Papunya-based artist Keanu Nelson, an intimate exercise in musical storytelling and reflection. The album's eight tracks, sung in both Papunya Luritja and English, are verses of prose and poetry pulled directly from Nelson's notebooks and set to minimalist, DIY electronic arrangements.The evocative musical backdrops_featuring Casio keyboards, drum machines, and subtle synth flourishes_were created in collaborative sessions between Nelson and Sydney producer Yuta Matsumura. The two met by chance on Matsumura's visit to Papunya last year. Their impromptu jam sessions form the foundation for Wilurarrakutu's low-key sonic palette, influenced in parts by Papunya's strong local gospel music scene as well as the reggae beats often passed around the remote community via USB sticks and mobile phone transfers.Over these soundscapes, Nelson sings of family, friends, heritage, and culture, with a tone that balances joy and melancholy. They're themes and emotions that also echo through his work as a painter at the Papunya Tjupi Arts Centre. In this way, Wilurarrakutu becomes an extension of his art practice - a graceful audio portrait of a place that evokes the resonance of home.
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.
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