- Following the career of Brisbane's Andrew Tuttle has been a journey of increasing depth and subtlety. If you've been kicking around this little berg long enough to know, you'd remember the splattery synths of Molliger: explosions of bratty, youthful noise, long since lost in the mists of time.
Andrew packed such in-your-face noises away and then started trading sounds under the name Anonymeye, slinging a guitar and laying down some dusty countrytronica, I almost didn't know what to make of it. With each ensuing release, however, he has refined this craft, working the synths and strumming into elegantly designed productions of variously ambient, folktronic or glitchy styles, all of which echo with what has become his trademark meshing of organic, acoustic guitar sounds with brilliant synth edifices, strange processing and synthetic echoes.
These Six Improvisations For Computer And Guitar move on from the place Andrew reached with 2011's Anontendre, heading into even smoother and subtler territory. Clearly a bit worried that people will think he's gone soft, the EP's accompanying press-release states explicitly that he's never been “...at ease with the ethos, imagery and sound of “new age” music.” However he does concede that new Anonymeye material has “...increased emphasis on a harmonious interplay between the computer and acoustic instruments.”
I don't think he's got much to worry about there. Six Improvisations takes advantage of the new quiet to blend genres more deftly than ever before. The briefest, ambient, country vista (like hearing a synthesiser from the top of an Arizona mesa) rolls into a pretty little folktronic ditty. Then syncopated glitches of synth melody blend into a blissful edifice of sound, before a propulsive synth melody, rolling like a massive, slowly rotating turbine, envelops everything in the kind of massive grandeur you'd expect from Blanck Mass. I could've asked for more of that, particularly since the penultimate track merely meanders through a very simple tune, that doesn't seem to want to go anywhere over the course of four and a half minutes. The EP's closing track, with a scintillating, brassy choir of angelic voices is again much shorter than I would have liked, but still reminds me of fellow Brisbanite Tom Hall's awesome, ambient structures.
Laid down simply, in only two days and with the barest amount of editing (though it did receive a little tweaking from experimental mastermind Lawrence English), Six Improvisations is not so fully realised that I can be completely satisfied. As a taster of where the Anonymeye sound is going, however, it's very intriguing. Ever more subtle, each sound worked more thoroughly into an interconnected whole, Anonymeye is, as ever, one to pay attention to.
- Chris Cobcroft.