Feature Article: Waltzing Macabre music column – Angelspit
When Angela Challis propositioned me to concoct a dark music column in a new Australian dark culture magazine – which you now hold in your hot little hands – the vastness of the topic weighed down on me. The Australian independent music scene – it’s an untrammelled sonic night! It’s unsurprising that Australian music has a dark side – our best-known folk song and “unofficial national anthem” is after all a crime story – and a ghost story. When a nation is raised on Banjo Patterson’s blithely morbid lyrics, that taste for misadventure moves so naturally to Nick Cave and his murder ballads.
Like Australian artists in other mediums, many musicians find greater success in Europe or the US, than they do locally. Unfortunately awareness of underground bands only breaks through into mainstream media when a van runs off the road – and suddenly The Red Shore become a household name. Distance and the expense of touring isolates each state music scene. (Sure there’s MySpace – clogged with bedroom projects!) With this column, you’ll get a taste of the finest exponents in genres that slip under the radar on Triple J – ebm, psytrance, emo, screamo, gothabilly, horrorcore, grindcore, heathen metal, burlesque, sludge – as well as scrying those dark stars who marry the macabre with pop sensibilities. (Maybe we will unearth the next Marilyn Manson? You never know…)
Our first feature artists are Angelspit, a duo hailing from Sydney. Named after a Sonic Youth song, and self-styled as ‘a riot grrl with a vocoder and a cyberpunk with a distortion pedal.’ Visually the pair play with baroque and medical fetishism, smashing through the looking glass. Sound confusing? Fortunately Chief Medical Synthologist Zoog is on duty to diagnose the relevant infectious grooves. “We write pop songs, then we beat them with a stick until they are demented and psychotically dangerous. Then we starve them for a few days, sharpen their teeth and set them loose in a room full of people.”
A prime example of local talent finding fortune overseas, Angelspit have taken their stompy boots on the road. “We did twelve East Coast USA gigs and 24 gigs in Europe. It rocked! A highlight was playing in an 1100-year-old castle in Poland with Frontline Assembly, Mortis and about 5,000 insane European Goths. Lowlight was packing up after a gig at 2am in -20 degrees in upstate New York. … I’m not kidding, it was minus 20!!”
Angelspit’s second full-length album ‘Blood, Death Ivory’ has just been unleashed on the world, both in regular pressing and special Bloodpack (with bonus goodies). Influences are outside the box. “…from R’n’B, metal, punk, 80s synth pop and European techno. ‘Blood Death Ivory’ is an experiment in ‘Ballistic Electro Punk’. It’s about getting away from the formula of goth and industrial and getting back to the raw idea of punk music done with synthesizers. There are big guitars in the album, and we’ve tried to make the synth match their fatness.”
Website: www.angelspit.net