Saga House / 2023 / CS
In the year 1980, long before absurd reticulating automotive tunnels marred the subterranean geology of Sydney, a new type of engine was churning away, shaping the Australian underground. With the establishment of M Squared Recording Studios, and the ascension of the mighty M Squared independent label, a man named Michael Coffey was teetering on a flashpan of visionary momentum. In the half-decade to follow, Michael and his partner Mitch Jones's M Squared label would go on to immortalize a bounty of unclassifiable and erudite, off-center, exploratory music, publishing preeminent releases by Makers of the Dead Travel Fast, Severed Heads, Scattered Order, Tangled Shoelaces and SPK among a mutant assortment of nameless amalgamations of peers therewithin. The engine was purring, but none of this could account for what Michael had assembled after-hours in the Cloakroom those first 2 years of the studio.
Expansive in its astral remit, A Cloakroom Assembly spins ambrosial in its learned approach to broad schools of thought: synth reverie, domestic concrète, Neuromancing art-funk dynamics, maybe a whiff of incense. All this a whole decade before Idea Fire Company and The Shadow Ring would echo the same criterion, but built out of solitude and a boundless curiosity no aesthete would exert. Remarkably consistent, forward looking, yet perhaps the shadowiest to don the M Squared stamp, the foundational ACrA releases were dispatched in 81 and 82 as two split tapes. They have since fallen to obscurity and unconscionable discogs price tags, and now have been resurrected, combined and expanded with 4 unreleased tracks from those years. The resulting masterwork is mystifying in its ability to survey the plains of emotive isolationism, but never to wallow in the maudlin, instead, using that canvas to weave avenues of a million threads, some parts of which would be picked up by others eons down the line but which, when consumed in its entirety here, still resound wholly alien 40+ (!!!) years later.