“The internet is a wonderful thing. I had no idea that western Australia had a rich experimental music scene. With my northern European prejudice I probably assumed that all too brief and rather damp summers were a necessary precondition for musical innovation. But thanks to the web, my prejudices can be confounded.

Gilded are Matt Rösner and Adam Trainer, both notable composers and performers in the aforementioned scene around Perth, who collaborate together on this album for the first time. Terrane was mostly recorded in the beach community at Myalup, although some of the piano which features strongly throughout the record was recorded in Perth in a room specifically conditioned to provide the optimum environment for the instrument.

When thinking of great experimental music (if you were a child of the Seventies and Eighties at least) I immediately think of Mixmaster Morris or Aphex Twin’s electronica or Philip Glass and Steve Reichat the more orchestral end of the spectrum. Gilded’s music pitches somewhere in the middle, and manages to create soundscapes that, while they are certainly minimal in approach, are nonetheless powerfully evocative. I use the term soundscapes specifically here, as the album title (a geological term apparently*) is highly appropriate because what their music communicates is determinedly about places and environments. The restrained use of repetitions, layered with gradual, patient progressions evoke images of wild and remote places.

The rich texture of their music is partly a function of the care taken in their arrangements, as well as the performance and recording. What adds so much to these compositions is the incredible resonance that they elicit from their acoustic instruments. While piano and guitar feature significantly, the instrumentation is also diverse enough to provide a highly original sound palette. Creating these combinations must have taken immense care and great deal of experimentation, and the overall effect works so well as to produce music that invites a deeply immersive experience.

The eclectic instrumentation is augmented by the use of field recordings. These serve to further strengthen the extent to which the pieces transport you to distant landscapes. Their application is subtle, for example adding a sense of heat shimmer to the scenes that Trainer and Rösner paint with their instruments.

As the tracks build, you may find yourself yearning for more progression in the compositions. The music moves you – but perhaps you want it to move further. However, this is the point of Terrane; it is music which describes places and panoramas – movement is not required and its simplicity is part of its appeal. Fundamentally, what makes this record stand out is the beauty that is achieved through its diverse arrangements. This gives it a richness which encourages listeners to explore the layers and textures, which pleases both aesthetically and through its invention. This music is original and well made, the like of which I have not heard before. – Jim Bennett”

-FREQ

“What a wonderful mind for composition Liam Singer has. Four albums into his career, he’s coming up with ever-more-detailed songs which only fit the pop label due to their presentation and singability. In all other respects, he’s a classical songwriter, building a song from cellar to roof, all parts in parallel: a detailed patterner with each idea serving the larger one.

A very small number of songwriters take the trouble to think like this. Brian Wilson and Prince, obviously. Jeff Lynne, Sufjan Stephens and Stephen Merritt, perhaps. Tim Smith, definitely – the interplay of vocal parts on Stranger I Know particularly recalls Smith’s pastoral work with Sea Nymphs or the more delicate moments on Cardiacs records as worked out with William D. Drake (another comparison that can be thrown into the circle). At work in his current hideaway in Queens, Liam Singer belongs to this world of the total song-composers: the ones for whom genre barriers are predominantly bubbles of resistance, and for whom form and content are inseparable.

Stranger I Know sounds like many things. Its links to American minimalism are clear in its collection of elegant cycles (from oompah bass to arching cello; shakers and flute; a mathematical glockenspiel climb) as they move against each other, interplaying in uplifting counter-rhythms. Beyond that, Liam’s omnivorous musical diet is made clear in the breadth of arrangement and intonation, stretching from romantic piano to staccato gamelan pot-clunk. Each instrument comes sheathed in its own immediate mood and pace, hanging onto its place in the dance by a skilful fingertip: just enough to snag a little tension and independence; just enough to flirt.

Shadowed and overflown (as ever) by the spectral caroling of soprano voices, Liam sings in a tone of wonder – and of determination. It’s all a little archaic: a spiritual love ballad with swaying time, an elusive subject and a courtly seriousness which ultimately fails to mask its fervour. “Stranger I know / thy face / from a dream. / All night I’ve yearned to hear that song. / – Once, it sang me.” There are hints of transformation and liberation here – “What was / before me / is now / behind me. / Strings fall / off of / a body,” – but devotion and freedom end up so closely wound together that there’s nothing between them. Liam finally stands set loose on the verge of… something. It’s unclear, it’s unsure, it could even be an end; but it’s welcomed, and while Liam’s left some things behind, he’s not alone. “Saw God’s / features – they / can keep ‘em all. / There is no / voice to follow / now. / And as the / noise / takes over, you / just hold your / breath, I’ll hold / mine too.”

Stranger I Know is also a little exercise in time-travel, working a gentle auger down through several generations of American tune and peeping through the hole. Liam’s previous songs have been beautifully arranged, evoking a classical ambience. This one – balancing a subtle, minimal complexity with fleeting kisses at its reference points – ups the game. In its shifting and its overlaying, you can hear migration at work. A little dose of romantic Europe dapples a line of American mountains: the breathless chorus (its rhythm offset from the dreamy verse) steps in like an old-country village dance setting up against the pistons and presses of a little factory in the hills. Behind the tinkling delicacy, that bass drum which comes in for the bridge hint at a barn-dance stomp: Shaker Loops to hometown hoedown.

All of this activity is encapsulated within less than three minutes. In, out, open. A little wonder.”

- Misfit City

“A damn sight cleverer than its diffident twee pop presentation would suggest, “Stranger I know” makes for a fine introduction to the introspective melancholia of Liam Singer.  The song has the simplest of sequenced melodies and yet Mr Singer manages to layer on enough heart and soul to make an admirably intelligent sonic confection.”

- BluesBunny

“At the start of post-rock, Simon Reynolds coined the term to highlight the technical innovativeness of a particular set of bands and it worked. Music history doesn’t highlight this, but Slint’s Spiderland and Nirvana’s Nevermind were both released in 1991. One would become the mainstream archetype for rock music for the next five years, the other a touchstone for the underground response to alt-rock’s popularity. It sounds arcane and ridiculous, but there was a real sense of moving past rock there for a few years; with Nirvana and Melvins and Sonic Youth and Mudhoney and Helmet all on major labels, all in the popular mainstream, what more could there be left to build? For a brief moment, rock seemed like finished business. And then the whole thing collapsed and rock has pretty much been out of vogue ever since, which is where it belongs.

The curious postscript to all this is that ‘post-rock’ stuck around and became a genre of sorts: mostly or entirely instrumental music, played by a rock ensemble, lots of effects, often with some sort of classical instrumentation: a violin, a cello or, in Apricot Rail’s case, a flute and clarinet. It may not be popular or critically admired or cool, but it has its audience and a network. There are post-rock bands in every Australian city and, like folk music, they all sound a little alike. I find it fascinating because folk art usually exists to maintain a verbal/lyrical conversation, but what do these bands have to say to each other and the people who like them?

All this is a bit much to dump on Apricot Rail’s shoulders. The Perth six-piece lay out an extremely concise and textured second album with Quarrels, and for the most part it manages to evade many of my least favourite parts of post-rock. There are plenty of chiming harmonics and clean, delayed guitars, gently shifting arpeggios and a glockenspiel lead, but the band also sneak in a few surprises: the droned outro of ‘Cicadas Part Two’; the super intricate structure, almost sampled feel of ‘Third Balloon’; the weird electronics of ‘Eked’; and a dedication to shorter songs. The album was mixed by Scott Solter (Superchunk, The Mountain Goats) with a view to maximum headphone euphoria and the stereo spectrum is given a thorough workout, the band cutting in and out, left to right and back and forth. It comes off as beautiful and exacting, if a little cold. So exactly right then.

Apricot Rail – ‘Basket Press’ by Hidden Shoal Recordings

Dialling into Quarrels makes a lot of sense, especially if I look out the window at sunny suburbia. Apricot Rail share none of Mogwai’s metal or Euro-club/pub tendencies, nor much of Explosions in the Sky’s American bombast, and very few post-rock bands in recent years have tried on the literary expanses of Spiderland. Instead, this band inhabits a world similar to how I see Perth in my mind’s eye: a very pretty and bright city by the ocean, the sort of place anyone would desperately want to live if they hadn’t grown up there (and if mining money hadn’t made dinner for two an upper-middle-class expense).

It’s a tight fit between sound and place. I think bands like Apricot Rail are about approximating the pastoral splendour and the clean suburban streets of Australia, something that might be problematic if it weren’t so niche, and in any case it’s something many of us live within every day. In a rock culture obsessed with painting Australia as a swamp or southern-gothic wasteland or a retched sprawl of rundown sharehouses, how can a small measure of prettiness be such a crime?”

- Mess + Noise