What with three tch-tch-tch EP’s (and an album in the offing), a David Chesworth album, two Essendon Airport singles and a Dave & Phil Duo single already having emanated from the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre. Melbourne would seem to be the home of avant garde (often ‘electronic’) ‘new music’ in this country. However, at least three Sydneyside outfits – the N-Lets, the Slugfuckers and the Severed Heads – are exploring territory that may not be essentially similar but is certainly as uncompromisingly experimental.
The Severed Heads (augmented by Jayne Mansfield) make a grating, pulsating electronic drone that’s more akin to the sound on a workshop floor than it is “music’. Ear Bitten, the Heads’ side of an album shared with Rhythmx Chvmx, contains six tracks, ‘recorded entirely on cassettes in bedrooms and kitchens’, using household appliances as well as synthesizers, tapes and the odd guitar, which are all but indistinguishable from one another. I like it (but then I liked Metal Machine Music…).
Rhvthmx Chvmx. otherwise known (in a slightly different form) as the Slugfuckers, are unlike the Severed Heads (and indeed most of Melbourne’s ‘new music’ practitioners) in that fairly conventional rock”roll instrumentation forms the core of the band. But Rhythm Chymx/Slugfuckers shatter your preconceptions of what an ‘art’ band should be – they simply bash it out, with a gleeful good humour and a cutting wit. In a way, they’re not unlike the Mothers Of Invention, circa ’68-’69, only as relevant in present-day Australia as the Fall are in present-day England. No Vowels. No Bowels is Rhythmyx Chymx/Slugfuckers’ third foray onto vinyl (following two singles), and a good one at that.
Meanwhile. back in Melbourne. the latest additions to its ‘new music’ catalogue come from yet more CHCMC affiliates – an album entitled Ledge, by Laughing Hands, and one entitled Cutheart by (David) Tolley and (Dure) Dara. Cutheart was recorded live. not at CHCMC but the Universal Theatre, the last bastion of Melbourne hippiedom. And it shows…