photo Gail Priest
photo © Orlando Sydney
photo © Orlando Sydney
photo © Orlando Sydney
photo gail Priest
It’s mid-winter and we’re embracing the mood. Pretty Gritty #3 is dark, industrial & psychomorphic. The Children’s Encyclopaedia’s drones will hypnotise, Paneye’s psych-folk will reveal our dream secrets and The Tormentor’s gothic industrial beats will release the demons. Then Andy Rantzen (ex Itch-E & Scratch-E), in his first ever solo performance,will channel spirit voices to take us to those dark dark places we both fear and desire.
Friends since their teenage years, Matthew Wakeling (St Jambience) and Adrian Elmer (Telafonica, The Boy Who Held His Breath) only managed to work together musically for the first time in 2012, both picking up ukuleles in a throw together jug band. The school holidays of January 2013 gave Matthew time away from his regular gig shredding lead breaks in RSL covers bands and Adrian from his regular gig teaching children to colour in, to create some recordings as a duo. Armed with a guitar, a bass and enough volume to resonate their studio's resident metal garbage bin, the two laid down the tracks for their debut release - The Piece Of The Earth That Broke Off. Pretty Gritty is their début live performance.
The Tormentor is an emerging experimental solo artist that explores all forms of electronic music. He assaults the senses with his macabre blend of industrial ambience transporting the audience within a complete aural journey. Combining eerie atmospheric whispers with back breaking beats, he delivers a new sound of dark and dirty electro. Under his belt he offers a dangerous and filthy musical arsenal which blows the listener into oblivion.
From youth he's always been fascinated with the loud nature of sound, its vibrations and the primal instinct it encourages. Developing through stages, he started with guitar, then later discovered a more intense electronic instrument, uncovering the world and unique sounds of the synthesizer.
He began to get enveloped in the world of electronic synthesis and everything that made sounds that were unique, pulling apart old electronic toys, circuit bending to create horrific sounds, tinkering with discordant tones and distorted riffs that were completely out of this world... From this The Tormentor arose.
Paneye is the moniker of Will Treffry. Will resides in Sydney, Australia and his music combines elements of psych-folk, ambient electronica and dream pop. Will’s vocals are somewhat reminiscent of an Ian Curtis and Nick Drake hybrid, while the second vocalist (Jessica Mutascio) adds ethereal, misty harmonies to a number of Paneye’s songs. (courtesy New Weird Australia)
Andy Rantzen is an ARIA Award-winning Sydney-based electronic music producer, writer and one-time tutor in philosophy of psychology at the University of Sydney. Untrained as a musician, and unable to play any instrument even to an amateur level, he relies on his background in psychology to inform his musical activities, and approaches studio work as, primarily, a therapeutic exploration of unconscious and instinctive desires via the medium of electonic programmed sound.
Since 1985 he has released fifteen albums on a wide range of labels, from Ministry of Sound Australia to Detroit's Generator Records and Belgium's Forced Nostalgia. A genre agnostic, he has collaborated with or remixed artists as diverse as Kim Cascone, Pelican Daughters, Itch-E & Scratch-E, The Wiggles, Cherry2000, Kamahl, Severed Heads and INXS. More recently he has worked with installation and video artists Heath Franco and Daniel Mudie Cunningham.
His current solo work, released by Sydney label 4-4-2 Music, picks up the threads of his interest in psychodynamic depth psychology. These songs explore unconscious states and desires through the medium of subterranian narrators or characters. These imaginary beings are trapped in repetition, expressing strong and intransigent views, and using a magical / symbolic dream language. This show will be his first ever solo live performance.