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By: Mark Gomes
Date: 28th Nov 07
Release: Compilation
To Cure: A predictable playlist
What:
Free Choice / Super Star split cassette
Who:
Free Choice and Super Star
On:
Independent, limited edition of 100
Where:
Missing Link, $5
MySpace:
Free Choice / Super Star
Related Links:
Free Choice parent group Maximum Awesome
This limited edition, lime-green-coloured split cassette is a strange and compelling mix of ambient sound concerns and punkish performance technique. Local acts Free Choice and Super Star have both contributed a single, twelve-minute track - one per side - and both are totally Cactus in terms of whacked-out inventiveness and sheer, brilliant conceit.
A-side, ‘Aztec Horse Hat', by Free Choice (aka Jarrod Zlatic), is analogue-electronic, phrase-repetitive and seriously trance-enducing. Like the outlines of great landforms seen from the windows of a speeding car, huge two-note synth lines change gradually and awesomely throughout, while pulses from a treated rhythm box vanish endlessly beneath the wheels. Imagine Klause Schulze on a crank come down, or Cluster's Zuckerzeit dubbed to two-track cassette.
Super Star's B-side,'Wandering Frond', is less abstract but just as heavy on the spaced-out repetition. Esther Edquist lays droning trumpet and vocal mumblings on top Kieran Hegarty's repeating guitar patterns, and in between there are all sorts of scratches, broken-junk and incidental noises. Again, repetitive short phrases constantly build up and fall away to imagine a vast, alternative sound landscape - this time set in a reflective, dreamy-edged and dusty basement.