100 Years: Creating a Timeless Musical Journey

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When we started making the 100 Years album in the austral spring of ’23 we had no title. It was a blank screen. But Michelangelo and I could feel the territory even without a map. Making John Lee Hooker’s World Today had been a learning experience and we wanted to build on it, create a flow of monochord music that sounded like it had been recorded in the 1950’s with aspects reflecting the 2020’s. I was obsessed with time, how it changes everything and how you can’t reverse the direction, how life draws you into the drama of now that can only be seen and understood in the rear-view mirror. Time flies on the wings of experience, it’s every lesson a psychic scar or seeding. 100 years, the timespan of a single human existence, every passing century a milestone and us caught within that grid – how do you make sense of this, transcend the limitations of bone and stone?

100 Years begins in broad daylight on the street where I live, a block of St Kilda I’ve been living in off and on since I turned 18. The cafe’s and bars and grocers, most of them shut down and cleared out long ago, storefronts standing empty, ghosted by teenage memories of a bygone era. The age of Aquarius begins in 2024, not 1968 – the machinations of the universe are slow, almost imperceptible, but total and irreversible in scope. In my mind, the buildings and footpaths fade away and all that’s left are spinifex bushes and saltwater swamps. I see a single road out of here denuded of white lines and I start walking. All around is bush rising into the hills. Everybody is missing, me included. Yes, trees are falling and there is no one left to hear the crash…

Up in the hills amongst the trees and the birds and the roos, I’d been writing pastoral lyrics, the escape from the city and everything that represents. But the words I was channeling dived off in other directions. The stream of consciousness kept talking about missing people from the now, from the past, from dreams, maybe this was how my subconscious was absorbing those losses, that grief. A few miles away up on Mount Franklin there’s a monument to three lost children who went missing in the forest near the timber mill, 150 years ago. Those kids were no different from all the other children of this world gone missing in our lifetime and they crept into my song, whistling in the dark, waiting to be found. I searched for metaphor to make all of this less personal, and only succeeded in hanging see-through curtains on a mystic twilight where all of us are essentially alone, all of us missing to someone we love in the same way we are missing to them. Somebody help me? In the end we help ourselves or drown. Guiding us through the labyrinth is the fascination and beauty of music, of sound, illuminating our lives with intimations of a reality much greater than our passing sorrows. As John Lee often said, blues is the healer…

The second half of 100 Years dilates beyond the calamities explored in the first songs. William Blake’s Earth’s Answer feels like the point at which the sound moves towards celestial heights, the war outside the window fading into universal night. The Eternal City follows the logic of a dream constructed from memories happening in a non-local location. The real is unreal, or rather all is one. The album ends with a hymn to the new dawn, the cycle is completed but can we move on? These songs revealed themselves to me over time, I had to have faith in the subconscious flow – that there was meaning here and not mere random chaos. It’s only looking back that I see these patterns emerge. While Mica and I were recording, I had no idea where this was going to go – and if I did have a clue as to that road, it wasn’t worth going there…

We recorded 100 Years live in the studio at Soundpark in two days. The room was microphoned from every direction, ambient mic’s with direct mic’s on the amps. Anything that happened went to tape. An archaic recording approach for capturing a song in its entirety with no further interventions possible that creates a sense of organic space and depth, as if the listener is in the room with us. It took Idge and us most of the first day just to cable up the room and work through the different guitar amps we’d assembled and test the electronics. Then we started recording the takes – most of the songs went for at least 7 takes if not more! We were trying to capture performance, not perfection. I dislike a manicured blues, better if it sounds like the mould growing in an abandoned bathroom. But this music, although monochordal, is complex. We had to tape the tracks over and over again and those songs we couldn’t nail in one take we spliced together from different takes the old school way. I like to think because of all this that this record sweats and breathes like a living thing even when it’s going full astral…