Anybody who’s been following the career of Brisbane-based laptop-meets-folk-picker Anonymeye (aka Andrew Tuttle) will recognise his gradual drift toward the world of synthesisers, culminating in a four-day residency at Rotterdam’s Centre for Electronic Music – a recording session that has provided an audio source for many of his releases since. The sound that has defined Tuttle’s music produced as Anonymeye has grown to involve an ever-growing arsenal of tweaks, sweeps, beeps and drones alongside its perky down-tuned steel-string figures. This split cassette EP pairs him with an artist less recognisable around these parts: Veli-Matti Ikavalko, known here as Kutomo.

Clocking in at about 25 minutes per side (with each artist contributing three solo tracks plus an edit of each others’), this release feels in many ways more like an album – and the light hiss and fluff of the cassette aids in the impression of a work removed from others. As tape moves past magnet, we learn other ways in which this release suggests themes of isolation.

Side A opens with Kutomo’s humming, buzzing keyboards drifting into the picture self-assuredly. As his pieces build – indeed, they may as well be one extended composition – so does a feeling of, well, religiousness. With his droning church organ sound twisting into arpeggios and shifting chord inversions, perhaps the allusion is too glib, but there’s a strong sense of the pious in Kutomo’s music. His deep, indecipherable and decidedly monk-like murmurings and delay-effected flute dance across the border of New Age without the proper paperwork. The side wraps up with an Anonymeye edit of ‘Kitara, Taivas Ta Jahdet’, which places Kutomo’s dense, ethereal evocations alongside a simple climbing acoustic guitar motif, lending the track a less intense, more pastoral tone.

It’s a perfect segue into Side B, where Anonymeye takes his formula and runs with it: plucked guitar patterns, sequentially assembled loops, synth augmentations and then the inevitable collapse. Tuttle’s finger-picked guitar style, oft-likened to that of John Fahey, doesn’t deserve the comparison – it’s far too inconsistent, even clumsy. You can really see where he’s trying to take it, but there’s an awkward heaviness to his picking that occasionally imbues his pieces with a nervous feeling, like watching high-stakes Jenga on the brink of toppling. Likewise, his loops can be rhythmically misleading.

In spite of these shortfalls, Anonymeye’s pieces are buoyed by a playful sensibility that counteract the potential awkwardness of some of his arrangements, and there are some beautiful melodies too. Yet compared to work on his recent album The Disambiguation of Anonymeye, there’s not enough variation in his approach to soundmaking on Song Traveller. At the same time, his meandering pieces are well matched to Kutomo’s slow burning dirges, and both sides of the tape make for rewarding close listening.

Aided perhaps by the long journey the ribbon of ferrous tape must make across the play head, Song Traveller transports the listener to a meditative, pensive state. Anonymeye and Kutomo are a complementary pair, particularly in collaboration, and theirs is a cohesive, outstanding split release that suits its medium perfectly.

by Babette Gladney