At its lurching, doom-laden best, Antarctica Starts Here sounds like Nick Cave leading Ennio Morricone on a drunken reel around an abandoned steel mill. At *ahem* other times, it sounds like an orchestra falling slowly down a slagheap.
Antarctica Starts Here isn't really a band. It sometimes involves other people but is mostly Kay Orchison alone with a Mac and a carpet-lined room full of musical implements in the backwoods of suburban Sydney.
The other people who have been involved from time to time are, to date, Jim Morley (bass, arrangements, sound recording) Lilly (bass, voice) Dr Nicole Cook (guitar, voice) Greg Sun (putative bass, cheerleading) and sundry small children from the extended Orchison and Crabtree clans.
Implements which have been used musically so far include acoustic guitar and bass, dobro, mandolin, theremin, a 1960s Conn organ with a Leslie cabinet and 48 individually out-of-tune tone generators, thumb piano, xaphoon, occarina, various children's toys (musical and otherwise), a full wine glass, a 1920s alarm clock, a pan of water being hit with a spoon, and the Voice of K, which if pushed hard enough sounds like circus elephants fornicating on a moving freight train.
Live, Antarctica Starts Here presently consists of Kay and a range of stringed instruments, played consecutively rather than concurrently. His voice is still deep and wide, even when backed by a single dobro instead of, say, the 1953 Soviet Heavy Military Printing Press Chamber Orchestra.
A tour band is in the works, and will join Kay on stage as soon as a few technical problems can be addressed, such how to plug the theremin into the Leslie cabinet and how to shoehorn artillery-fire percussion into a pub without violating OH&S regulations.
Recently completed for Australian release in the very near future, the Sorry Flag E.P. is four tracks of rich, dark Spaghetti Western with a country-style industrial white noise sauce.
Track list:
Sorry Flag is dedicated to Myron Selby, who has from time to time been the only known fan of Antarctica Starts Here, with special thanks to Simon Hunt (Pauline Pantsdown) for the John Howard radio samples. It will be available in a numbered hand-made limited edition at gigs.
Also being passed around at present is Sounds From the World of K, which is what passes for a solo acoustic demo in these strange days. It is four raw-as-shaved-bollocks, overdub-free, as-you-find-it one take wonders that sound like they were recorded on instruments made of linoleum and tinfoil in the bottom of a bucket. This is a true and correct representation of how Antarctica Starts Here currently sounds live. Approach with caution, light blue touch paper, and retire to a safe distance.
Track list:
The tracks linked above are available here for download under the Australian version of the Creative Commons license. This means you can download them, burn them to disc, give them away, email them to your friends and enemies, share them over peer to peer networking, play them in public at free events or on community radio and we'll all be fine with it so long as you attribute the work to Antarctica Starts Here.
If you email me and get the go-ahead first you may able to remix them, cover them, translate them, sample and loop them, whatever, but sometimes I'll have to ask other people and they may say no. Be cool. Get used to it.
If you're going to make money out of them, however, you'll have to get written permission and probably give some of the money over. We can negotiate terms at the time. Email me if you want to propose an arrangement like this, and face our collective amazement.
Whoever wrote the song owns the song and can record it again and release it elsewhere under whatever terms they like, so you may be able to find "different" (better) versions of some of the songs in other places. The license only applies to the recordings presented for download here, not the songs themselves, which belong to their authors.
Not all the recordings will always stay available here so download them when you see them.
K, 19 March 2007