- Synthwave really only had a nebulous existence back in the 1980s: a sub-genre descriptor catching up those bands who had even less use for guitars than most new wavers. When you ask who exactly that applied to, people wave their hands vaguely in the air and say, “oh, John Carpenter, Vangelis, you know.” Matter of fact, I’m not sure I do, or that it was really a thing at all. Contemporarily, however, it’s a definitely thing. Retro aficionados like Com Truise and Kavinsky spent the first decade of the new millennium turning their love of the soundtracks to Escape From New York and The Terminator into reams of moody, ambient soundscapes, studded with spitfire synth quavers. It sounds like the grim dystopian future of Syndicate and Neuromancer and you, the listener, are a William Gibson hacker hero, sporting a pair of surgically implanted mirror shades.

In just the last couple of years the style’s really taken off: John Carpenter isn’t making movies any more, but he is re-releasing -to rapturous acclaim- every bit of music he ever made and every other producer and the vintage synth they dug up at the pawn shop is travelling to the dark retro-future.

It’s actually a little bit surprising that  the new album from Mathew Watson, aka Melbourne’s Other Places, has obviously been infected by the synthwave bug. Mat is a proper veteran of electronic music in Australia, cutting his teeth more than ten years ago on downtempo electronica and instrumental hip hop as the drummer for Mountains In The Sky, doing arty electro-pop with Magic Silver White and, more recently, drumming for the stylishly, scarily krautish rockers Taipan Tiger Girls.

He’s also found time to put out three records as Other Places. The first two, a self-titled one in 2011 and 2013’s Symbols are a bit different from this latest one. Mat, as noted, is a drummer and drums were a key feature on those two albums. Actually, Mat was so busy with his 1972 AKS EMS synth that he had to enlist fellow drummer Dave Williams to pound the kit, live, while he was busy twiddling out his best impressions of The BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The resultant sound had more in common -both in its liveness and experimentalism- with the krautrock of, say, Can, than Vangelis. I reckon you can still hear a lot of that vibe in Mat’s other gig, Taipan Tiger Girls and maybe because he can sweat it out behind the kit there, he’s changed tack, just a little, on his new Other Places LP, Lost In The Sea Of Paradise.

It’s the drums, again, which are key, mostly because they’re barely there. I’m not sure when it happened, but Dave Williams is no longer on the Other Places roster and the beats are notably synthetic all across this record. I think that Mat is still drumming, at least some of the time -  the video to single T.R.N. certainly has some shadowy figure cutting sick on a kit, but to listen to it’s difficult to tell. Combine that with the machine-gun quaver patterns that litter this collection of works and it pushes the style right over into synthwave.

There’s also a lot that’s the same about Other Places: driving rhythms powering instrumental, dark synth music. In many ways krautrock and synthwave are two sides of the same coin, but given how established the hallmarks of synthwave have become, the changes really stand out here.

With so many people getting involved in the style, it makes Lost a little less distinctive, but not any less enjoyable. To be honest, I can’t think of a single thing Mathew Watson has done that I don’t like and I’m a long way from saturation point with synthwave too. I guess you can frame it with a metaphor about John Carpenter movies: seeing one is good, but a marathon of They Live, The Fog and Big Trouble In Little China, is the best.

- Chris Cobcroft.