From the dried gourds of West Africa and clay pots of the Indian subcontinent to the washboards of jazz, zydeco and skiffle, or from the ‘little instruments’ which the Art Ensemble of Chicago brought and used in bulk to the truck stompers and clapped thighs of Fiona Apple, there is no shortage of music made with found or otherwise makeshift percussive instruments, but on the Australian artist and HTRK founder Jonnine’s latest album she makes a ‘Rococo’ in all of its intricacy solely out of a cascade of kitchen implements and a few other household sounds, from the clinking of cutlery against cups and saucers which serves to ground the rhythm, keeping a kind of askew time, to water being poured, objects being put down and a series of indistinct scratches and rattles, a few loose gongs and a drilling noise which sounds like a naturalised and domesticated woodpecker.
Otherwise her skeletal rhythms make space for apparitional vocals which loiter at the intersection of choral music and the sort of muffled non-lexicals which one might overhear from behind the shower curtain, with ‘Ornament’ a piece of cod-reggae in the manner of ‘Redondo Beach’ as though heard through a toaster, and signal flutes or marching fifes colouring the foreboding air of ‘Wrong Instinct’.
In fact that recorder which blares out on ‘Wrong Instinct’, embedded within another world of context, evokes nothing so much as a series of windy and reedy hip hop classics from the Pharcyde by way of Quincy Jones on their signature tune ‘Passin’ Me By’ to the sample of ‘Prison Song’ on Future’s much parodied ‘Mask Off’ or the pan pipes of ‘Praise the Lord (Da Shine)’ by A$AP Rocky and Skepta. Meanwhile amid the gongs, the church and shop bells and the chugging and cawing of ‘Spring Deceit’, her vocals sound like Julia Holter’s at their most transient.
Jonnine portrays Southside Girl as emanating from an apartment by the suburban seaside, describing ‘A pact with the ocean, popping candy, night trains, the lethargic limbo of summertime from Boxing Day to New Year’s Eve’. The opening track captures some of that hangover, with the lapping water and bird calls of ‘December 32nd’ scrambled by a layer of crackling static which sounds like leftover party sparklers. ‘Star Anise’ features lilting wind chimes and a prying bass, and ‘Poochie’s Pies’ seems to dwell inside the walls of a mute diner.
Through piquant fragments of personal history, the title track manifests the keening undertow of much of the record as Jonnine repeats the lines ‘I’m a southside girl / I grew up on the seaside / as I spent my youth / listening to secrets of seashells / as they told me / hold onto your mother’s pearls’ before juxtaposing her mother’s furtive nights out, at least from the perspective of a child, with the gaping maw of the ocean. The album was captured offhand on a portable 6-track, and as her voice washes back and forth in the mix it carries the staggered quality of an incantation.
Southside Girl is a breezy daytime record which drifts from domesticity into the unknown. ‘Shell Cameo’ washes off a bit of salt and spume while ‘Sea Stuff’ returns us to the seaweed and the waves, an oyster riddle over ramshackle percussion, some of which comes courtesy of the Melbourne-based drummer and Maritz collaborator Maria Moles. Then the album draws to a close with ‘The Bells Chime’ whose laden keys and cooing swells are redolent of Grouper, as those shop door peals continue to jingle and jive now with more of a spectral portent.
