Deleted Scenes
The first duo album from Conrad Standish and Tom Carlyon (ex-Devastations) reveals a meticulous emptiness. It channels the sound of desire rather than desire itself, writes ANTHONY CAREW.
At a recent show at Melbourne’s Gasometer, Standish/Carlyon pumped so much dry ice out on stage that billowing clouds of it crept out the band room, slowly inching along the rest of the building’s ceilings as if making a run for a John Carpenter casting call. Whilst the fog seemed sinister and spectral for those attempting to flee it, burying oneself in the blanketing, low-vision haze proved a symbolic entrance into the duo’s music, which dowses instruments in vast quantities of trailing reverb and summons similarly smoke-machined music videos of the ?80s.
In their prior incarnation, as chief chaps behind Devastations, Conrad Standish and Tom Carlyon played stately, suit-clad post-punk whose own clouds of smoke were dude-ish cigarette plumes. The band so trod in the rock mythology of the Melbourne/Berlin axis that they walked the line both musically and geographically. Rebranded as Standish/Carlyon, they now linger, longingly, around a sound steeped in the misty mystique of that moment when one-time New Wave fops like David Sylvian and Talk Talk turned towards expansive art-rock soundscapes. It’s there, vividly, in the borderline-lurid ?Moves, Moves,? a dramatic epic whose boinged bass lines, cascading synth parts and precise drum programming make for a meticulous, mannered take on what would’ve been a prohibitively expensive production in 1984.
?Clawing through its ambient haze in search of some centre reveals only layer upon layer of fog upon fog.?
Trying on a new style like a new outfit – a thought literalised by Standish’s current leather-bar look, which is but a few studs short of Rob Halford on the cover of Creem* – would’ve once summoned serious indie handwringing re: authenticity et al. But where those discussions are normally just tedious, this time they’re totally misplaced. Here, the style is the substance: *Deleted Scenes, the debut Standish/Carlyon LP, is a fastidiously produced sound-piece foremost, with its songs feeling like a product of that sound; the tunes taking their spirit from the album’s obsession with surfaces. The title may riff on the banality of DVD extras, but its evocation of deletion suggests the essentiality of absence in the music; this central lack signifying a sound purposely hollow, where clawing through its ambient haze in search of some centre reveals only layer upon layer of fog upon fog.
Sometimes that ambience takes the form of ambient music, like with ?Industrial Resort,? in which the mechanised shuck of a rudimentary drum machine is slowed to a spooked crawl and lingering synth tones are blown over in billowing exhalations. Or ?New People,? which uses dub production’s horizontalism to balance an array of downward-trending elements – whitewashed vocals, sadface melodica wheeze, groaning industrial clank – all stylised to summon malfunction, disorientation or death.
Otherwise, the cloudiness swirls around in almost recognisable forms, and one of the LP’s favourite forms is the slow jam. ?Nono/Yoyo?, for all the drama in its radically treated guitar tone, shows how central Standish is to the music’s more structural, forceful moments: his coiled bass plucked with funky punch, his vocal pushed forth, pitched up towards falsetto, and performed – especially on the lines ?You’re stranded in Kyoto/with nothing but a yoyo/Your credit card’s in Soho/at Yamamoto’s dojo? – with theatrical ?lan. On ?Nono/Yoyo,? the slow jam serves sentiments of love’s absence, of love lost to distance. But the quiet storm of ?Gucci Mountain?, concerned as it is with ?the principles of leisure/the DNA of pleasure,? flashes outright seduction.
Standish/Carlyon – Gucci Mountain by Chapter Music
In R&B records and ?80s action-films, the purpose of the slow jam is functional: to soundtrack fucking. And to serve as a mood-setter, too. But the airiness of Standish/Carlyon’s meticulous emptiness seems like it lacks the form to cause friction: no bump to go against the grind. Even when they project carnality, Deleted Scenes is so far removed from rock’s regular physicality that it feels like an abstraction: the sound of desire rather than the desire itself. Which is perfectly in keeping with a project where the ambient – the echo, the sheen, the endless dry ice – is the defining element.
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