Erasers

Australian duo, Erasers, do not so much as produce ‘songs’ more manifest moods, mantras and metronomic magick. Conjuring and projecting scapes and spaces to beat a retreat to or from, addressing the themes of human frailty and faulty signals. The connective tissues that bind, wind and blind the self to notions of comm-unity, the mechanical movements routinely made from the toil of birth to the soil of the Earth.

Comprised of Rebecca Orchard and Rupert Thomas, ‘Constant Connection’ (out on Night School Records (UK/EU) & Fire Talk Records (US/ROW) is their third album since their debut ‘Stem Together’ in 2015 and 2019’s ‘Pulse Points’.

Emanating from Perth, arguably the country’s most remote outlier in a land of vastness and endless horizons, the album derives and divines its essence from the energies of isolation: physical, psychological, philosophical creating a ‘meditation on landscape, power, the shadow-world of human emotions and stream of consciousness’.

A waltzing tonal thread is inter-weaved through and within. Flailing and wailing guitar riffs scale and swoon, drum loops skitter and scatter. The song titles tell their own tales, each and all call out to an inner sanctum, a reach in towards the elemental, searching to discover what makes us require an-other. Heavy curves are so tightly sown.

Articulating the blurred lines between reality and fantasy, the evident and the submerged as reflections are recognised and refracted in a process of re-cognition. Recollections are replayed and relayed. Effective transmission is dependent on stable frequencies and clarity of (pro)vision. Reconciliation is requisite.

Repetitive recitals, choral cacophonies, chamber-chants and dissonant drones create a melancholic (yet never maudlin) miasma, a hypnoidal (en)trance, (f)altered, ambient states that at times recall Stereolab and Cavern of Anti-Matter at their most synth-etic, stentorian and sparse.

Arthur Russell’s avant-pop ‘world of echoes’ and ocean platforms also resonates as subtle sonic touchstones on ‘A Breeze’ and ‘You See’; ‘Recall the words’ is Nico’s Teutonic sprechgesang for the plugged-in-digital generation. Orchard’s slow-paced incanted intonations contrasted with throbbing bristles of electronic effervescence.

The titular ‘Constant Connection’ embodies the present’s networked world of Marshall McLuhan’s fantasies. Both good and bad. You decide.