A little while ago Lakes (aka Melbourne’s Sean Bailey) inadvertently introduced me to the music of British psychedelic folk group the Incredible String Band during an interview. The profoundly lyrical, melodic and weird music was spinning quietly in the background over the telephone line and has ever since – perhaps unfairly – reshaped my perception of Bailey’s music.

Unfair maybe, but it’s an angle more fitting than the view that Lakes is another Jackson Pollock-esque noise musician, hurling conflicting sonic colours onto a canvas and moving on. Cursory listens might suggest that brazen textures dominate here, but listen closely and the peripheral murk gives way to some truly inspired songwriting, marked by the type of unfathomable strangeness that aligns Bailey closer to occult artists like the aforementioned Incredible String Band more so than any transitive “noise rock" sensation. The harsh textures here are a means, not an end. They envelop Bailey’s minimal instrumentation in a fog of aural cobwebs, creating truly confounding and transportive music.

The songs creep up, but what stands out initially is how rugged each element sounds – whether it’s the tom drums lurching in a narcoleptic march, the funereal organ melodies or the gravelly Eastern scale guitar riffs that always resolve into a melodic arc despite the brashness of his playing. Bailey’s voice is a monotone dirge that rides high in the mix, rusted into “urgent” mode, offering inscrutable incantations, fleeting images and nonsensical sensual data.

Cloven was originally released as a limited 12” vinyl in 2008 on Bailey’s own Inverted Crux label. This CD reissue comes via Sydney label RIP Society and is a welcome reminder of one of the more eccentric pieces of Australian psychedelic music to emerge in recent memory.

There’s nothing quite like it.

by Shaun Prescott