If you could identify one common imperative among the current crop of experimental DIY labels at the moment, it’d be the tendency to embrace the smallest format possible – a 3” CD-R in this case, but also a 7” or cassette – and release as many of the bloody things as possible. Sydney’s CURT Records has inherited this modus operandi, releasing a number of split releases culminating in this: a release featuring Marcus Whale’s Scissor Lock and Cameron Webb’s Seaworthy. On one side of the ring you have a relative newcomer, on the other, an artist approaching the venerable “veteran” status.

Scissor Lock’s piece, ‘I Know Where Summer Goes, begins with gorgeous time-lapsed guitar chime that resonates and loops languidly, the layers glazing together like heat on fresh tarmac. Clean multi-tracked vocals slowly edge towards centre stage, building inexorably and gradually meshing with its surrounds before abruptly diving away for the impending guitar loops that follow. It’s a very efficient 10 minutes of music, never giving in to the inertia so common among more flagrant and ad hoc sound artists.

If Scissor Lock’s contribution is a lucid Sunday afternoon staring up at a canopy, Seaworthy’s piece is altogether much darker, pre-dawn, haunted and furtive. For those only familiar with Webb’s 12k issued Map In Hand, it might come as a surprise how capable he is of wresting the elementally unsettling out of his sources. Ever subtle, ‘Mountain Fox and Sky’ is a miasma of smoky textures that conjure morning silhouettes and vast halcyon fields of 3am calm. Quiet guitar notes occasionally penetrate, foreshadowing the coming light, but if Seaworthy is best known for depicting sunlight this is a compelling antidote to expectations: there’s a sense of the malign lurking somewhere within the dark stillness.

Summer Sketches is testament to the 3” format really, because neither Scissor Lock nor Seaworthy’s contributions would fit seamlessly into their respective oeuvres. It makes this a special, transitive document of what lies on the flip side.

by Shaun Prescott