Genre > Rock > Alt & Grunge

The scope of Robert Beatty's hydra-headed art practice has grown into an extreme articulation of unconfined creativity across multiple disciplines. A founding member of 2000's noise outfit Hair Police, as well as visionary illustrator and album-art designer for many of this era's most celebrated underground artists, Robert Beatty records his solo work under the name Three Legged Race. Come May 27, 2014, Three Legged Race will release the first volume of Rope Commercial, a planned series of EPs premiering through the label Underwater Peoples.

Rope Commercial Vol. 1 will be the first Three Legged Race record since 2012's acclaimed Persuasive Barrier (Spectrum Spools / Editions Mego) and Beatty's follow up to last year's video score collection, Soundtracks for Takeshi Murata (Glistening Examples, 2013).

Beatty's recent celebrated performances as Three Legged Race abandoned prior synthesizer-dependent set-ups in favor of an intentionally dematerialized approach, employing just a sequencer program in an iPhone, and a lone tape machine. Conceptually, Beatty is defitantly shrugging off the fetishized hardware-oriented model so rampant in current electronic music discourse. Beatty steps further in this recording, having added acoustic instruments (dulcimer and piano) and thoroughly processing sampled elements to warp the whole into un-recognizable dimensions.

Outfitted as a picture-disc, Beatty’s design features a creamy, neon-green urban landscape; the face of a humanoid figure is merged with a screen of a smartphone, its consciousness fused to the glass. Dangling from the phone is one leg outfitted in a woman's heel, presumably its sole means of transport. These kind of pathetic cyborg figures in states of physical flux frequently appear in Beatty's art. They function neatly as windows into Beatty's music as well, with its electronically marred voices and barren sonic spaces. These figures are Beatty's torpid avatars, in both his music and art, their humanism is strained by a confounding digital synergy.

The picture-disc is an apt setting for Beatty's airbrush work, his favored rendering tool, and the general modus operandi of Beatty's electronic music as Three Legged Race. In all, Beatty renews obsolete materials discarded from a voracious commercial culture, and employs them in strangely poignant contexts. In Rope Commercial Vol. 1, such found samples are diced and strewn into uneasy chapters. There is the dizzying, terse "All Ajax Dial", the interplanetary gale of "Aside From Each Other and Together Overnight", the faintly whirring "New Government", the white noise of "The Humidity Mascot" and perhaps Beatty's motif-to-be "Rope Commercial." In this title track alone, something of the whole EP is condensed: intentionally un-heroic melodies plod out over a darkly redundant groove and voices are haltered in the instance of utterance. Its electronic music most overtly, but defrocked of its sheen, with any conceivable hallmark of commercialism littered on the gravel.

To deny reality is to create conflict, he always tells us. No one knows how it happened, or when - but here in the last known metropolis on Earth, where all public memory has been erased, Evan Ønly is on a mission to recover the promise of our future. He works among other maverick scientists, artists, and revolutionaries in shadow, intent on piecing together our shattered history. It was mass denial that led us to the state we’re in, Ønly is on a mission to prevent us from making the same mistake.

His material draws inspiration from the classic “future vintage” synth pop he discovered through his archival explorations. His work is evocative of British pioneers Pet Shop Boys, La Roux, and David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”. The debut Evan Ønly EP, No Matter What, is a highly-evolved synth rock record. Produced by Ice Choir’s Kurt Feldman at the pristine Winter Station, these first six songs are personal anthems turned psychological pop. Ønly creates music in the belief that pop can still change the way we see ourselves and the world — the one we’ve inherited and the ones we’ll build next.

Following his 2010 effort, Moon Deluxe, the rock-and-roll musician Andrew Cedermark spent 2012 putting new songs to tape in an honest-to-goodness rock-and-roll recording studio. Ten of these songs make up his new album, Home Life, which is set in New York, New Jersey and Virginia, and which, loosely, is about growing up only to find that you didn't have to, and the subsequent discovery that the process is irreversible.

Free Time formed in the summer of 2012 around Melbourne luminary songwriter Dion Nania (Panel of Judges). After moving to New York in 2011, Nania kicked around for a while, played some lead guitar with fellow Melbourne transplants Scott and Charlene’s Wedding, then helped out the Twerps playing bass on a national tour. Shortly thereafter he began writing new songs with the intent of putting a new band together, eventually enlisting the support of Adrienne Humblet on bass, Jonah Maurer on guitar, and Michael Mimoun on drums.

Filling out Nania’s jangly, sometimes heartbreaking pop, the band quickly recorded most of their first LP the day before Dion flew home to mix it. He returned with fragments for new songs and the band finished the record in December 2012.

Nania’s songs tell stories of following love across the world, of being unsure about the future and of his place in it. Like the trans-pacific ping pong of the last 2 years of his life, his songs veer between sweet sadness and wild exuberance.